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After ten years and millions of dollars in legal brawling, Sorrento’s historic “The Sisters” estate will be sold.
The 3-acre property is expected to fetch around $20 million when it sells next month, smashing the record for the price of a home in Victoria.
The Sisters was owned by eccentric, but lonely gay millionaire Peter Thomas Rand, and is part of a $50 million property portfolio that includes the Mahonga mansion in Domain Road South Yarra, and 79 investment properties in Melbourne’s inner eastern and south-eastern suburbs.
It has direct access to Sullivan Bay Beach, and is one of the largest single land holdings on the Mornington Peninsula.
Rand, a property developer, made headlines in 1993, when he paid almost $700,000 for the South Yarra property next door to his own, so that he could cut down a tree blocking his own house’s view to CBD.
Rand’s death in 1997 from prostate cancer sparked a Supreme Court dispute involving friend Michael Aquilina, who lives in Rand’s South Yarra home, and Toorak couple Paul & Pamela Harpur, who have been living at Rand’s Sorrento home.
The Harpur’s produced a copy of a will which would have come into effect six days before Rand’s death, allowing them to live at The Sisters estate until their deaths, when the property would then be left to the National Gallery and the Anti-Cancer Council.
The authenticity of the will was disputed several times since 1997, ending late last year when the Appeals Court threatened to evict the Harpur’s, who are believed to now be renting in Toorak.
Close companion Mr Aquilina and a Hawaiian man, Douglas Clairborne – reported to have once been a lover of Mr Rand – still live off income generated by Rand’s estate.
The sale of The Sisters is set to smash the coastal record set in 2006, when the Mt Eliza estate of Sir Reginald Ansett sold to interests associated with retirement home operator Charles Jacobsen for $14.5 million, who will use it as a beach house “compound” for his family.
The highest price paid for a home in Victoria was set last year when art dealer Rod Menzies paid $18 million off developers for the Stonington mansion in Glenferrie Road Malvern.
Stonington, which acted as Victoria’s Government house between 1901 and 1932, was controversially sold by Deakin University, which used it as its Toorak campus, in a deal negotiated on Christmas Eve 2006.
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