Summer Beach Spotlight: Archer Capital's acquisitive Palm Beach weekender buy-up

Summer Beach Spotlight: Archer Capital's acquisitive Palm Beach weekender buy-up
Jonathan ChancellorDecember 8, 2020

Peta Minton, wife of the equity firm Archer Capital managing director Greg Minton, has spent $4.76 million at Palm Beach.

It’s a 1917 house – last sold 40 years ago – with sandstone basement and shingle-clad upper level with polished floors, three-metre-high ceilings and a sandstone open fireplace. All very much a throwback to the pioneering days when Palm Beach precincts garnered enduring nicknames such as “Pill Hill”, given the prevalence of

Macquarie Street
doctors on the hillside overlooking the beach and “Spin Hill” given the many spinsters on Sunrise Road.

Quite possibly the lower strip of Palm Beach Road will in future become known as Archer Capital Slopes, as the Minton’s near neighbour is Peter Wiggs, another managing director at Archer Capital. Wiggs and his wife, Electra, paid $4.5 million to secure Awarua in 2007. Wiggs, one of the longest-serving executives in the Australian private equity industry, having previously been at Rothschild Australia, joined Archer Capital in 1997. There's one house between the two acquisitions.

Awarua, a 1930s weekender that sits on an 873-square-metre block, previously traded in 1960 when it was bought by Edeline Jenkyn, wife of Sydney barrister Norman Jenkyn, QC.

The Mintons’ recently purchased property is listed on the Pittwater Local Environment Plan given its heritage significance, but extensions are possible given council approval. It was sold by the Boden family through LJ Hooker Palm Beach agents David Edwards and Amethyst McKee, who had marketed the property with $4.5 million-plus hopes.

Before joining Archer Capital in 2000, Greg Minton spent six years in management roles with CSR Limited including CSR Humes, the manufacturer of precast concrete products. Archer Capital, with $2 billion in funds under management or advice, has notched up over 30 acquisitions in leveraged buyouts since 1996 involving total aggregate funding of $5 billion. But the directors have some way before catching up to catch up with the long-acquisitive merchant banking types from Macquarie Bank et al.

In some years over the past three decades there have been $100 million plus in acquisitions by banking types as enriched old-timers depart the pricey peninsula. At Palm Beach, and also WhaleBeach, the emerging banking takeover can be traced back to the late 1980s when merchant banker Jim Dominguez and wife, Suzanne, snapped up their hillside double block for just $215,000. In 1990 the 2,200-square-metre Moonrising property was bought by merchant banker Stephen Higgs for a record $3 million. Merchant banker Rob Barry and wife, Mary, then spent $2.2 million on a house in 1992.

A property called Tehongi, on

Florida Road
, sold for $1.9 million to merchant banker Chris Roberts and wife, Frances, in 1993. And merchant banker Rob Rankin bought a property in 1995 for $852,500.

Nick Whitlam, when of the merchant bank Whitlam Turnbull, jokingly called his former WhaleBeach holiday home Wokka Waters – a reference to the estimated $9 million fee his firm received for its 1988 advice to the Fairfax publishing group.

Jonathan Chancellor

Jonathan Chancellor is one of Australia's most respected property journalists, having been at the top of the game since the early 1980s. Jonathan co-founded the property industry website Property Observer and has written for national and international publications.

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