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Want to live like a billionaire?
The Australian Financial Review’s Rich List for 2026 recently revealed that 178 Australians are billionaires, with about a quarter of those on the list building their wealth in property.
Property was the second most common way to make the top 200 over the past year – it made up $136 billion of the list’s $707.25 billion total value, second only to mining.
And for those who made their money in other industries, property remains a source of personal or secondary investment.
Still, getting an accurate picture on the cost of the homes for the ultra-rich is not always easy – meaningful Cotality data topped out at the top 5 per cent of prices.
Gerard Burg, Cotality’s head of research in Australia, said, “these [billionaire home prices] were so extreme that we couldn’t get reliable data out of the system on them”.
“When you look at lists of record sales, they are often co-located in very small pockets,” he said. “It winds up being rich people selling houses to other rich people, and the cycle continues.”
The richest people in Australia have lived in the same homes, in some of the country’s richest areas, for several decades.
Australia’s richest person in 2026 is Gina Rinehart, who has held the title now for seven consecutive years. The iron ore magnate has significant rural land holdings and a total estimated wealth of $39.01 billion.
Like her business, Hancock Prospecting, she inherited her sprawling home in Perth’s exclusive riverfront suburb Dalkeith from her father, Lang Hancock.
Australia’s second-richest billionaire, Henry Triguboff, made his money as founder of property developer Meriton.
With $32.28 billion to his name, he owns an expansive waterfront home in Sydney’s Vaucluse, which was purchased in 1984 for $4.1 million. The property next door was added to the block for $6 million in 1998.
Recycling magnate Anthony Pratt was third on the list, worth $25.19 billion.
While Pratt has moved to the US to expand his Visy business, his family home, Raheen, is in Melbourne’s Kew. Pratt inherited the property from his father, Richard, who purchased it from the Archdiocese of Melbourne in 1981.
But some of the most expensive homes in Australia aren’t owned by those at the top of the list.
Coonac, on Clendon Road in Toorak, sold last year for what at the time was thought to be the most expensive property purchase in Australian history.
Settlement documents revealed that Georgina Bastas – wife of pharmaceuticals billionaire Dennis Bastas, No.26 on the list – paid $124 million in cash for the home, and recently bought an adjoining property for $12.1 million, adding another 1200 square metres to the existing 1.09 hectare grounds.
The title of most expensive property goes to an amalgamated apartment in the Residences One tower at Barangaroo in Sydney, which sold for $141.55 million tomillennial multimillionaire, Yan Zhang – who does not appear on the list at all.
The most expensive house purchase goes to Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, now 13th on the rich list with wife Kim Jackson, who paid $130 million for the Point Piper cliff-top mansion Uig Lodge in 2022.
Farquhar sold his previous home, Elaine, for the same amount – in the same suburb — just two years later. He and Jackson have a portfolio of properties across NSW and are worth a combined $11.7 billion.
Burg said while house prices are slowing in many of the areas where the wealthy live – Domain data shows median house prices in Toorak and Kew in particular both declined by more than 10 per cent annually in the March quarter – top-end homes were unlikely to be affected by factors such as rate hikes or uncertainty.
“We’ve done research in the past on prestige houses, and often they’re simply sold for cash,” he said. “When your net worth is so high, it often separates you from the general market and the trends within it.”
While the top 5 per cent of houses in Melbourne might be valued at 2.6 times the median (which is about $958,000), the Bastas’ Coonac mansion sold for around 130 times the median.
Burg said the wealth of the ultra-rich had expanded much more rapidly than the median income, which meant the gap between the median and prestige markets would probably widen.
“Increasingly the median house value itself is out of reach of a lot of people,” he said. “It has become a less useful measure when looking at disaggregated patterns across markets.”
