Bondi hoarders pay to stop auction
The Bondi hoarders' property was withdrawn again from auction last night, after the Bobolas family bought an auction reprieve.
In yet another chapter in its saga, it was the fourth auction that failed to go-ahead.
The family have had to outlay some $340,000 in two installments to keep the sheriff at bay.
There were around 17 interested parties at the offsite auction room, but the property was pulled just 20 minutes after its scheduled 5pm auction.
The owner Mary Bobolas had been at the sheriff's office at 4.25pm with cash to stop the auction. They needed to pay a further $160,000 to meet the newest set of cleaning and legal bills.
Earlier this month they had secured a temporary legal stay that stopped another auction only to have the court's direct the auction proceed tonight because their wads of cash was not enough.
A $2 million sale had been anticipated due to its prime location and 550 sqm block size that last sold in 1973 at $15,000.
The Boonara Avenue offering was listed under instructions of the NSW Sheriff's Office.
It was the fourth time that the marketing failed to end in any under the hammer sale.
There was another unexpected delay last month.
Previously the owner Mary Bobolas dodged the sale of the property February last year by coming up with $180,000 to pay Waverley Council's cleaning and legal bills just hours before that scheduled auction.
The drawn out process has seen buyer interest wane as when it was first listed in 2015, 63 contracts had been handed out. Last month it was in the 30s. This time interest was down to around a still impressive 17 attendees.
The council's solicitors wrote to the Bobolas family in November asking for settlement of the outstanding money to avoid the sale but they received no funds.
Raine & Horne agent Ric Serrao was commissioned by the NSW Sheriff's Office to sell the property so that clean-up costs can be recovered on behalf of the council.
Rubbish flowed out of the door and onto the property frontage on the latest listing images despite a 10 truck clear up in July last year.
There were no inspections possible for prospective buyers.
Ric Serrao couldn't even access the property so there were no internal photos or floor plan available.
A 2008 study by John Snowdon, professor of psychological medicine at the University of Sydney, showed a increasing prevalence of cases of severe domestic squalor.
At least one in 1000 elderly people are living in appalling squalor, with most having dementia, alcoholic brain damage, schizophrenia, frontal lobe damage, and a few had obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care issued guidelines for agencies ranging from local councils to the RSPCA that confront the problem, suggesting a heavy-handed approach can cause huge distress, and typically did not take long for the squalor to rise again.
This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph.
