Tweet Facebook Mail We've never been more desperate for housing stock in Sydney and most of us can only dream of one day living in a mansion. Yet, dotted across Sydney, are sprawling homes worth up to tens of millions of dollars which have been left vacant to slowly decay for years. Urban explorer Craig Irving has been photographing abandoned houses for decades, since the early 2000s, and has been documenting his finds on his Facebook page Histografixx .
OLYMPIC HUB: Find all the latest Paris 2024 stories from Wide World Of Sport here "Durath" in West Pennant Hills sold for $42 million in 2015 and has not been lived in since. (Supplied: Craig Irving) Irving said many people would be surprised to know just how many opulent homes were sitting empty in the country's most expensive real estate market. In many cases, the properties had been bought by developers looking to subdivide the estates and reap the profits, Irving said.
However, sometimes the developments went sour or, in other cases, simply took years and years to come to fruition, he said. It's estimated that there are 140,000 "inactive" or vacant homes in Australia, according to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in August last year. The state with the highest number of vacant homes is New South Wales, with 22,000 empty properties in Sydney alone.
One of those properties is the grand estate of Durath in West Pennant Hills on Sydney's upper north shore, which sold for $42 million in 2015. OLYMPIC ME.