Collette Dinnigan sells Paddington investment

Fashion designer turned tourism property entrepreneur Collette Dinnigan has sold her Paddington charmer for $1.7 million.

It was on the market for 80 days after failing to draw any bids at one of the last March onsite auctions before shutdown.

There had been two bidders who declined to go higher than the $1,725,000 vendor bid for the two-bedroom Mary Pl 1850s home.

The BresicWhitney agency negotiated its sale as market confidence bounced back.

The investment was bought in 2017 from her brother, creative director Seamus, who paid $1.08 million in 2015. They retain a Darling Point house, with retreats at Bowral, Milton and a Rosedale Airbnb cottage which burnt down during the bushfires.

Dinnigan and her husband Bradley Cocks, have been in Italy, where they were quarantined in their 500-year-old Puglia farmhouse, but flew back to Sydney last week on Qatar Airways.

“While lockdown has been difficult in many ways, it’s given us time to work on our property, planting vegetables, repairing the dry stone walls, painting, cooking and experiencing a more sustainable, simplistic life which we have loved and don’t want to leave behind when restrictions lift,” Dinnigan noted.

Sydney has 18,000 listings, 30 per cent down on the same time last year. Private treaty vendors typically face a 36-day wait for a sale, with a 3 per cent discount required on asking ­prices, according to CoreLogic.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Telegraph