Former world #11 surfer and jiujitsu expert Luke Stedman buys beach compound in hot new surf ghetto Suffolk Park for $1.67 million!

Canny ex-pro surfer takes advantage of plunging property prices around Byron Bay!

Luke Stedman, whom I’ve known for two decades and who has so far avoided any sort of obvious age-related decay, is one of those rare surfers who, although never highly monied, flourished post tour.

He is the son of the man who created the billion-dollar ugg boot empire; is a part-time model; a surf coach; is a teacher of the western world’s next yoga-esque craze ginastica natural; carries a brown belt in Brazilian jiujitsu (one rung off black) and is a swordsman par excellence.

So good, in fact, even your ol pal DR was forced to bow to his bravura performance during a three-day long battle for a French television show host in Tahiti in the very early two thousands.

Two years ago Luke, who is forty-six, moved from California to just behind Lennox Head to form a family cocoon, a commune, around his Daddy Shane, creator of the ugg boot and the eponymous surfboard manufacturer SHANE, one of the most authentically Australian Australians alive. 

Shane had just turned eighty and was a few months out of surgery to remove “balloons” in his chest. These growths squashed his lungs, reducing his ability to breathe by eighty-five percent. 

They sold the family house of almost forty years at 61  Hillcrest Avenue at Mona Vale there for five mill and bought a hunk of land at Tintenbar, five miles north-west of Ballina. 

“Buying some land, throwing a couple of shacks on it and moving dad up the coast so he can watch the grandkids and we can keep an eye on the old grommet,” Luke said at the time. 

Now, Luke has spent $1.67 million Australian dollars on a four-bedder in Suffolk Park, that one-time bleak as hell offshoot of Byron Bay that has now become the hottest surf ghetto since 2009 Bondi Beach. Throw a Gucci sandal and you’ll hit some surf industry figure in the beak. 

The joint, which has the strong bones of a double brick suburban house although little of the gimcrackery glamorous Luke might prefer, is a canny buy for the Daddy of two and husband of sexy hair stylist gal Darsan O’Connor after property prices tumbled twenty percent in the area over the course of the last six months. 

It last sold in 2016 for 945k, a handy seven hundred in the pocket for the vendor although Luke also benefited from beachside Australia’s wild surge in property prices.

A year back he sold his Avalon place for $2.4 million after buying it for one-one mill in 2006.