Legendary surfboard designer responsible for modern shortboard fails to sell “opulent, lavish, extravagant” Byron Bay mansion as property market teeters on precipice of hitherto unseen crash!

Party's over for the property casino!

With a leopard grin, a green flare flaring from his slitted eyes and a tiny body that vibrates with excitement and joy, there ain’t no mistaking the master shaper Bobby McTavish.

McTavish, along with pals George Greenough and Nat Young, was instrumental in the shortboard revolution which washed ashore in 1967, slashing two feet off the boards thereby gifting surfers the ability to hit and hang around the lip.

McTavish’s story is a good one: he was a state-of-the-art shredder who quit competition despite giving hell to the heroes of the time, Midget Farrelly, Nat Young and so on, helped create the modern shortboard, turned Jehovah’s Witness, had five kids, invented, way ahead of their time, these epoxy moulded replicas of pro surfers’ boards (called Pro Circuit Boards), went back to longboards, sold the label, made a little cash and made, crucially, some fine real estate investments.

Like his Palm Springs-themed mansion in Corkwood Crescent, Suffolk Park, which he listed for auction six months ago with a three-and-a-half mill price guide.

Prices for houses in Suffolk Park, once Byron’s poorer cuz, had shifted almost seventy percent in two years. To put that into perspective, in 2019, 2020, a million bucks would’ve got you a place like this.

Anyway, that guide shifted to three-seven and when it looked like the auction was gonna fizzle, the McTavish house was given a sale price of four-point-two million.

No takers.

Now, as the Australian property market teeters on the precipice of a hitherto unseen crash, driven by accelerating interest rates and a terror of overcommitting among buyers, the joint has been taken off the market.

Ironically, McTavish, who’s now seventy-eight, was of that early seventies Country Soul era, surfers splitting the cities and heading to Byron Bay for “full contact rural immersion.”