Don't blow the chance to live like a king!
Do you dream of, one day, living in a sub-tropical paradise where everyone is young and beautiful and sex positive? And with waves that have crystalline lips and that crash onto powder white sand?
This place exists and it is called Byron Bay.
If you’ve a little cash in the bank or a generous line of credit, therefore, you might want to make an offer on the pro surfer Dion Agius‘ “Forest Bungalow”, a shipping container bungalow midway between Byron Bay and Suffolk Park.
(See it or rent it on Air BnB here)
Dion, who is thirty-three years old (“Crazy! I can’t believe it! Where did those years ago?’) and lives alone in a little house in north-east Tasmania, has put the property he bought four years ago on the market last night and is asking for “expressions of interest.”
From the real estate advertisement,
This stunning 1289m2 block comes with approved council DA plans for a beautiful architecturally designed home. Given the size of the land STCA there is potential for subdivision. The land currently hosts a very cool converted shipping container.
Treed crown reserve on both the north and eastern sides enhances the appeal and privacy, as does the beautiful established trees and tropical gardens that are well positioned along the boundaries giving you your own private forest home to an abundance of local birds.
Earlier today, I spoke to Dion about the sale. It is a rare thing to get Dion on the telephone. There is no reception in his little wooden cabin in the town of Scamander at the mouth of the Scamander River between Saint Helens and Saint Mary and he has to walk down to the river to make or take a call.
He hadn’t surfed for a month since busting an ear drum during a trip to Indonesia.
“It was horrible. I slapped my head super hard,” he says.
I was living in LA with my buddy who ended up passing away and it got to the point where I was living in this shithole traffic going to showings and thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing? This is horrible.’ It made me revaluate my life. It’s not about making a quick buck. I found a spot down here, forty acres on a river, no one around.”
Dion moved to Tasmania after two years in Los Angeles selling Epohke sunglasses that he describes as “the worst two years of my life. It changed my whole perspective on life. I was living with my buddy who ended up passing away and it got to the point where I was living in this shithole traffic going to showings and thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing? This is horrible.’ It made me revaluate my life. It’s not about making a quick buck. I found a spot down here, forty acres on a river, no one around.”
His plan when he bought the Byron property in late 2014 for $610,000 was to winter in Byron and summer in Tasmania, where he grew up and lived until he was fourteen. As it transpired, after he built his shipping container studio it was booked out so often he could never find a slot.
Dion says he doesn’t particularly want to sell the Byron house but, well, property is going pretty nuts in town and he figures why not cash in before the boom evaporates.
“I haven’t put a price on it. The real estate agent and I are just feeling it out, seeing what people are thinking. The thing is, I love the block. It backs onto crown land and the previous owners planted a little tropical forest on it. That was the reason I bought it so, for me, it’s worth quite a bit. I looked at a lot of other spots but I didn’t find anything as special.”
The money would be useful. He’s doing up his house (He’ll be slinging VJ lining on the walls and installing lights after he hangs up) and is trying to convince buddies to build their own shacks on his forty acres, “a little getaway commune with my friends,” he says. “I want to create a gallery, a studio, do events, festivals, fun stuff.”
As it is, he hangs by himself most of the time, although his parents are fifteen minutes drive away and some of his best friends from primary school are nearby, although family commitments usually keep ’em busy.
“I surf or go skate. And I have space and trees,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about.”
just another Johnny come lately cashing in his byron dream already, like most imports they dont last long, they come for the green lifestyle but its really the greed lifestyle they want, turn byron into far north bondi turn a quick buck and fuck off, we certainly got sold that capitalist money hungry dream didnt we, when the measure of your success is paying off an overpriced house in a small coastal town that you never grew up in with the hope you can make a quick profit off someone else by either making them pay your mortgage with overpriced rents or sell it off in a few years for a profit driving prices higher and higher, turning towns that had character into generic hipster wastelands, the very thing they come to get away from they end up dragging with them but of course you look cool to our other greedy friends on you Instagram when you say you bought a house in byron
Dion is this generation’s Benji Weatherley.
Why?
I’m a huge fan of poontang.
Re Mr. Agius’ blown out eardrum, I nose-poked a rogue chop at the bottom of a big long steep drop earlier this winter, whacked the surface like a stepped-on rake. The side of my head SA-LAPPed! with see-stars force. Hood though. So ear fine. At least hoods are good for something.
Moral of the story is that, clearly, safety dictates we all wear wetsuit hoods at all times, land and sea. When I see you in yours at Starbucks we can do the Beachgrit secret handshake. Which is, as far as I can surmise, we interlock irony-free shakas with one hand and gently choke one another with the other.
So living in a shipping container is your idea of living like a king?
Are you guys still in the commonwealth? He should propose this king’s mansion to the newlywed heir…
Oh, and when there’s no price on it, and we’re just feeling it out and seeing what people are thinking, it’s called blind auction, I guess.
Scamander is heaven on earth – wedgie beach breaks and bugger all people. Actually, Byron is heaven on earth too. Actually, all of Australia is heaven on earth (except regional inland New South Wales).
Scamander doesn’t have Nimbin a short drive away but.
No, but it does have St Marys and you can get heaps of drugs there – provided you only want meth.
Dion Agius had the cash to drop $610k on a freaking seasonal house? How?
My thoughts exactly.
he’s probs been on 500K a year for a goodly while. Easy enough to secure finance with that.
I would say so! But seriously? 500K salary for doing a couple of trips and shoots a year? Who the fuck is paying that? I can’t even think who his sponsors are/were.
Globe seemed to have quite a lot of cash to throw around for a while.
At one stage they were actually operating without a marketing budget. As in – money is no object. Get someone to tell you the story of how they thought they booked Run DMC for one of their parties, but in actuality were fleeced for 50K US.
This doesn’t surprise me at all.
annnnnnnnnd this here is why none of these companies can survive! ridiculous business models! create a good product, go to market and everybody loves it. hooray! make some money – but line your pockets (upper management, marketing directors) first and then pour the rest into your team to massage a few egos. the minions doing the product development, design, logistics et al get the shits for basically being employed to be north koreans (don’t forget lots of growth and opportunity) and will eventually leave. wait, where did all of our money go? only have a budget of $3.50 for this campaign. company silently, slowly dies.
good on dion for getting his hands dirty and realising how vapid the surf industry is.
Globe.
I can attest he has been on that for at least 8 years
That fucken traffic in and out of Byron is a fucken joke.
What are they doing to fix that ?
Anything ? Nothing ?
God help you if you lived at Suffolk and needed to get to the hospital.
May as well go to Ballina, I suppose.
straight up Bangas road to the highway, faster anyway.
Ah – yea, I see. There it is on the map !
Fuck, that means I must have missed that turn twice.
Two trips thru town to go north – dopesmack
no what we called the the drunk way home across st helena is the go , especially in summer , just not between the times of 2am and 5am , its why its called the drunk way home
its strange cos it can’t be caused by people going to and from work.
haha – you’re right !
Mostly fucken tour buses and fucken freedom camper vans and throw in a thousand rentals every hour – bingo.
Try and get a park from 11am on – faarrk. Kaos
they built a bypass already, you just stay on the highway and it goes thru the mountain to ballina just not many people are on to it, and you should just go straight to tweed if you brake a bone , have a stroke or bitten by a snake, cause that shining white elephant of a hospital isnt built to cope with any of it and if you need evacuation by helicopter you need to be transported down to the sports fields becuase they neglected to build a heli pad at the new hospital. Far North Bondi Council doing its best
So I am renting a super sweet room in house but have been shut down on Airbnb and vrbo. I have sucked it up and am now moving out and investing in a sweet roof top camper. Please make rents 3000 instead of 4 and we could afford the fucking rent without hustling and scrounging. Good on Dion for trying to survive!! I’ll build him a proper rental for cheap!! Fuck the rent gouging speculators? Nah, just move to the beach till pele fucks things proper!!!
Move to Puna. Choke cheap land
Dion hard up for some coinage? Even if the arse drops out, he still wouldn’t make a loss. And warm water is much easier on arthritic bones in the autumn years after spending your youth destroying your body boosting massive airs
amen
nah. you are just soft. harden up. snow on the ground. changing in the cold. walks across soggy moors. all keep the lineups empty. fuck the warm water crowds.
Vicco is more crowded than the Gold Coast. wetsuits are too good.
Ahhhhhh, not even close.
vicco isn’t cold, longy. sheesh. if your water tops out at 12 and dips to 4 in winter then we are talking.
I bet you’re secretly living in Noosa, trying the old reverse psychology to try and get the crowds to fuck off
shudder. never. i feel dirty just thinking about that place.
old blokes with ‘far king’ stickers on the noses of their boards
I wonder if there was ever a professional surfer who did more with less? The guy has one turn, two airs and a beanie but has been relevant for a decade.
His airs are high as fuck and his attitude is always super positive. Dude thinks outside the box and more importantly, for himself. I’m sure he’ll still be relevant in another 10 years.
Don’t sell Dion, you’ll regret it.
Love, the better angels of your nature.
Au contraire. He’ll sell for a million-ish now and pick it up for 500k in a few years time when the ass falls out of the Byron market…
I’m afraid that is not going to happen.
Pals of Hemsworth, Matt Damon lining up to get in .
Bangas bowlo is about the coolest joint on earth fri night.
It’s only getting started.
Take the low interest money on the equity in the joint, you’ve already upped the capital gain by a big margin, to finance the Tasmanian commune.
Put another shipping container on the Byron ridge and collect the Air BnB gravy.
You’re welcome.
chicks don’t dig cold and sunglasses look terrible in Tasmanian gloom.
But gloom and misery is the engine room of great work, no?
for writers yes, not pro surfers and sunglass entrepreneurs.
How do you keep your head above water and not disappear your mind in the public bar?
good luck?
Backstroke is always a good option when things get shitty.
Is byron shire still in massive debt ?
the council? I don’t think so.
So the potholes are a feature?
thank fuck for that guy that paints the pretty pictures around them.
Yeah I’ve got my hat in the ring up that way and I can’t see it slowing down anytime soon
All the cool cats are cashing in at Noosa and pushing the wheelbarrow full of cash to Byron. Be warned.
good luck for them, they’ll need to elbow Hollywood and Chinese money out of the way to get in
Matt Damon won’t be moving into a shipping container with Deng Zhou Ping anytime soon.
I almost drop kicked Matt Damons mutt when it barked at me down the beach
You and Barnaby Joyce are just haters. Poor Hollywood hounds.
We’re banning foreign investment from that shithole country, USA. I’m going to be Prime Minister.
I like it. Too much jet lag to get down there from the USA anyway. You people could have had the decency to put Australia closer.
God and his son, the bearded Jesus know, there will be nothing to regret in living on 40-acres in scamander. There’s a lefthand reef not far from there (with aframe wedge reforms inside it!), that i will take you to one day, and you will be converted.
plus! global warming bonus means in no time at all the east coast of tassie will have the Byron’s current climate.