This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
MINING and agricultural magnate Gina Rinehart has retained the title of Australia’s richest person, becoming the first Australian to claim a fortune of more than $40 billion, while Meriton boss Harry Triguboff came in a comfortable second, according to this year’s Financial Review Rich List.
Rinehart’s gong is her fifth in a row. Rising market valuations of her mining companies saw her personal wealth jump by another $3.2 billion over the past year.
Australia’s 10 wealthiest people are now worth $222.6 billion, and the top 200 a collective $625 billion – up by 11% increase.
Meriton, whose serviced apartments towers have been prominent feature of the skylines in Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, last year officially made its first expansion in Melbourne. The 57-level 140 King Street tower opened with 298 rooms and is the 23rd Meriton Suites hotel opened by Triguboff, who launched the business 61 years ago. The Meriton business also now incorporates 29 childcare centres that are built or under construction.
In the past year, Triguboff also returned to Brisbane after a decade, paying $130 million for a large CBD site in a complicated and protracted deal with 87 individual unit owners.
Photo: Ian Waldie
Rinehart, meanwhile, has continued to reshape her extensive property portfolio, and has a key figured in multiple major agricultural transactions in recent times.
Her Hancock Prospecting has just settled on the $8.6 million acquisition of mixed-farming property Chrome Park in Victoria’s Western District.
Last year, Rinehart furthered her selldown of S. Kidman & Co cattle stations across the Northern Territory and Queensland, with four stations spanning 2.4 million hectares of and selling for more than $200 million.
That was followed by the purchase of two Wagyu cattle breeding properties from Canberran billionaire Terry Snow’s Packhorse Pastoral Company for $80 million, and in December, she bought the 1,918-hectare Split Rock Dairy in northern NSW that will be used to expand Hancock Agriculture’s Wagyu cattle backgrounding capacity.
Also last year Rinehart reportedly paid more than $20 million for 2,000 hectares of mixed farmland in south west Western Australia.
Rinehart has also been expanding her broader commercial real estate portfolio. In November, she splashed out $240 million on the 175 Eagle Street Brisbane office building owned by a Charter Hall fund, which followed her $100 million purchase earlier in 2023 of 70 Eagle Street from US funds group Pembroke.
Third on the 2024 Rich List is Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and his former partner Annie Cannon-Brookes at $24.4 billion – they appear together on the list as it is understood no asset separation has taken place, according to the Financial Review – and his co-founder Scott Farquhar is fifth with $22.9 billion. They have traded the title of owners of Australia’s most expensive homes in recent years, beginning with Farquhar’s $71 million purchase the Elaine estate in Point Piper. The Cannon-Brookes topped that a year later $100 million acquisition of the Fairwater Estate next door – both were acquired from the Fairfax family – before Farquhar wrestled back the title with the $130 million buy of Point Piper’s Uig Lodge at the end of 2022.
Farquhar’s title would likely be smashed with a sale of Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond’s Point Piper waterfront mansion Wingadal, which was listed at the start of this month with expectations of more than $200 million.
Recently-split couple Nicola Forrest and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest appear at eventh and eighth on the list, with respective fortunes of $16.9 billion and $16.8 billion after their assets were separated. Their Fortescue Metals Group in the past year acquired Australia’s biggest sheep station – the 1.011 million-hectare Rawlinna Station in Western Australia – while early in 2023 they picked up Australia’s first Waldorf Astoria Hotel, in Sydney’s Circular Quay, in a circa $520 million deal.
