As HSC exams draw to an end this week, Title Deeds looks back on how some of last year’s students are faring in the housing affordability crisis. Congratulations to Guan Cheng Tao , the former St Joseph’s College Hunters Hill student who last year made the HSC Distinguished Achievers List. A year later he has bought his first Sydney home – finance-free.
The six-bedroom, four-bathroom residence in Bellevue Hill purchased by Guan Cheng Tao is not your usual student digs. Credit: Domain His parents Bai Yun Niu and Yong Sheng Tao must be proud, so much so that they may have even chipped in on the $19.75 million residence.
Tao’s new digs, settling to his name this week, are not quite the student accommodation many readers once knew. Instead of beds on milk crates and door frames as clothes hangers, this is a grand six-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion in Bellevue Hill with a pool and self-contained quarters. Pocketing the proceeds is investment banker and former Rothschild managing director Colin Richardson and his wife Helen , who had listed it with Laing+Simmons’ D’Leanne Lewis.
Richardson bought it in 1998 for $1,485,000 back when he was recently appointed adviser to the billionaire pastoralist Kahlbetzer family, then headed by the late agribusinessman John Kahlbetzer . It’s a role he maintains for Kahlbetzer’s sons Markus and Johnny . Still with our teenage cash buyers, the corporate interests of 19-year-old Xinyue Xue has paid $7.
9 million for a whole-floor apart.