Surf icon Taj Burrow and the Tamarama real estate decision that cost him $10 million 

Insane price spike nets buyer of Taj Burrow duplex ten million dollars in four years!

Real estate is a game where, with a few good pivots, even the fool who’d never build or invent or service can find a quick way into the millionaire biz. 

Taj Burrow, the almost-fifty-year-old former world number two, knows. He’s one of the few high-profile shredders from the nineties who didn’t invest his formidable bankroll, at least entirely, in hookers, Balinese bars and coke.

He’s got the award-winning Nautilus House at Rabs, rented by Nico Cage at two k a night, a sprawling eleven acres of bucolic loveliness fifteen minutes from Yallingup’s white-sand beaches and unforgiving reefs and, at one point, he had a two-bed duplex a few steps from a hunk of Tamarama dirt that sold a year back for forty-five mill. 

Back in 2014, see, Taj, then thirty-six and the second oldest surfer on tour, bought himself a top-floor, three-bedroom duplex circa 1950s that overlooks the area’s best, though wildly fickle, wave, McKenzie’s Bay.

Tamarama is where multi-multi-million dollar houses and million-dollar-plus apartments created by the city’s best architects (Hello Alex Popov! Luigi Rosselli! Kelvin Ho!) hang over either a coastal footpath (Kenneth St) or a narrow road (Gaerloch Avenue) that winds around to the neighbouring beach, Tamarama, where surfers ride either an imperfect left off the northern headland at low-tide and a squishy little rip bowl right near the shore at high tide.

Fun enough.

Taj’s Mackenzies Bay three-bedder, with garage, cost him 2.3 mill, two hundred gees cheaper than its asking price in 2010. An epic buy.

For reasons known only to Taj and the gods, four years ago he quietly sold the joint off market for $3.9 mill. I remember at the time, a real estate agent pal, suggested I have a lil chat with Taj to tell him he was wildly undervaluing the place. 

Of course, I didn’t, no man likes being told what to do with his fortune least of all by a muckraker with barely enough scratch to buy the board shorts made by his sugar pops Billabong. 

Anyway, a real good buy at under four. 

And, this was amplified real loud, real clear, late last year when the other half of the duplex, the ground floor, sold for, wait for it, drum roll, clash of symbol, honk of the klaxon…

Fifteen million dollars.

Nowhere near the view of Taj’s old joint, same land, same beat-up garage. 

(Surf music fans will be pleased to learn TB’s garage was used to record the Beefs’ breakout hit Red Bellied Black Snake.) 

I imagine the ten bricks are neither here nor there for the always pleasantly balanced surf legend but does this lost op remind you of any or all of your own poor real estate pivots or biz decisions?

I’ve won, lost, won, lost and, six days ago, put all my chips back on the table, coincidentally fifty yards from the former Taj Burrow duplex.

How about the below the liners?

Tell me about catastrophic losses and big wins, the pain, the joy and so forth.