Bondi kosher butcher snagged for whopping $12.8m

Prominent eastern suburbs investor Vaughan Blank has paid $12.8 million — millions above reserve — for Sydney’s first kosher butcher’s shop in Bondi Beach.

Richardson and Wrench Bondi Junction’s Andre Frack in conjunction with Metro Commercial had a packed room on Tuesday at the Commercial Auction Centre in the city for the old Hadassa Kosher Butchery at 17 O’Brien St.

There looked to be seven bidders for the butcher’s shop — set up by Holocaust survivors — that also had the seven apartments above on the title and had a $10 million price guide.

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Bidding had been so slow at the start that it liked like it might even get passed in.

The rooftop at 17 O’Brien St, Bondi Beach.

Auctioneer Jessie Davidson from Auctionworks accepted a lowly $7.5 million offer to get it going, with the casually dressed Blank there from the start.

Most of the bids were in $100,000 increments.

But when the bidding stalled, there was a vendor bid at $9 million and Davidson went back to Blank who said: “I don’t bid against myself.”

In the end, it came down to Blank and another bidder that Frack had on the phone.

Prominent eastern suburbs investor Vaughan Blank.

Blank looked to be getting agitated as the duel of $50,000 bids went on: Frack would shout out offers in $50,000 increments and Blank simply wink and nod back his $50,000 counter offer.

Little surprise though that Blank — who has an extensive property portfolio in the east and particularly Bondi — emerged victorious.

It was a similar rapid-fire bidding performance to December 2017, when he paid $33.25 million — the highest price achieved at auction for a residential property in Australia — for Eynesbury, a block of Art Deco flats at 22 Albert St, Edgecliff.

The car park at 17 O’Brien St, Bondi Beach.

Blank also owns all but one of the eight apartments at the Notts Ave, Bondi Beach block Maxwell Court Block.

He snapped up Roseanne Beck’s top-floor flat with ocean views for $1.675 million in 2012 — less than the $1.7 million guide at the auction.

Blank had bought the rest in a $9.3 million deal with the liquidator of the assets of developer Gary Baker and his Hermes chief wife, Karin Upton Baker in late 2010.

Blank bought Eynesbury, 22 Albert St, Edgecliff, for $33.25 million in December, 2017.

The couple had bought the flats one by one in an $11.18 million spending spree between 2002 and 2008.

Now only lawyer Phil Davenport — who inherited the third-floor apartment his mother had bought for $33,000 in 1975 — is holding out.

“He told me in 2012 that he would consider an offer of $10 million for his apartment. He said: “If I had to move, well, maybe $10 million might get me something equivalent. But there really is nothing equivalent.”

This article from the Wentworth Courier originally appeared as “Vaughan Blank pays $12.8m for Bondi’s kosher butcher shop”.