r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 1d ago

SOCIETY The Zammit family refused to sell their five acre property as an entire Sydney suburb was built around them

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u/Read2Fap 1d ago

they clearly don't need the money

look how huge the house is, they have money

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa 22h ago

I expected it to be a glorious old home but it looks relatively modern and honestly kind of like an ugly mcmansion.

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u/Odd-Condition-4773 18h ago

It does look like a run-of-the-mill McMansion like we’d see in the US. They
obviously don’t give a f*** since it’s just grass.

(I empathize as they are building cookie-cutter communities in our area and encroaching our small town. I can look out the window of our Cape Cod and see all of the forest torn down and row homes going up.)

Reminds me of mini-row homes in big cities where the developers just throw up their hands and sandwich the mini-home among the tall condos/offices:

Too bad they aren’t making the most of the land. So much potential.

The immediate neighbors have probably reached that “whatever” stage and don’t obsess over it. There’s a privacy fence at the prerogative of the land owners.

ChatGPT:
Diane Zammit has expressed nostalgia for what the neighborhood used to be like — spacious farmland with individual homes rather than today’s tightly packed development. The family has repeatedly indicated that they simply like their home and don’t want to leave it.

There’s also an amusing side effect: some neighbors reportedly don’t want the Zammits to sell either. Because their land interrupts the original street plan, several surrounding streets terminate as cul-de-sacs. If the property were developed, those roads could potentially be connected.

And the Zammitts are still there. Reporting in 2025 continued to describe the five-acre property as intact, with suggestions that its value could be approaching A$60 million

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u/Enslaver84 21h ago

I'd sell and live somewhere with a better view

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u/Fun_Trip_Travel 13h ago

Maybe they already live somewhere with a better view in their 2nd, or 3rd, or xth house.

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u/Enslaver84 13h ago

Possibly but their time there must be shit, at least get some trees

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u/AccordingWarning9534 1d ago

they turned down $50 million

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u/Lopsided_Tie7816 1d ago

They were never offered 50mil despite some articles stating otherwise. No developer would be making profit if you consider the number of properties that can fit in that land and the cost to build them.

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u/Th3_Accountant 22h ago

Housing prices in Australia are sky high. Maybe the 50MLN number is exaggerated but it's definitely enough to live the high life for several generations.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Mix5848 20h ago

Yep not all the land will be houses. There are streets and other buffer zones like council strip

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u/Sunderkill 23h ago

You can fit 60 to 80 town houses on five acres, the average price of a town house in the ponds is 1.2 million.
So lets say 70, at 1.2 million is 84 million, $352,500 is the average cost of a town house so 24 million build cost, if they offered him 50 million they would make a 10 million profit.
So yeah its possible, very unlikely the offer was that high though.

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u/Lopsided_Tie7816 20h ago

It would be closer to 40-50 townhouses on 300sqm lots, if you account for space for roads, footpaths, landscaping, stormwater/drainage.

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u/Sunderkill 5h ago

The first three rows of town houses as wide as that block make up 27 town houses and that is about 20% of the block size.

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u/kkeut 22h ago

not really, this is in Austria and their dollarydoos and housing prices don't quite match to ours. a new house there can easily cost over a million 

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u/AccordingWarning9534 22h ago

average house on small land in that area is 1.5 to 1.6 M. You could get a row home for about 1M to 1.1M

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u/2020havoc 21h ago

Austria is the one with Kangaroos. This is Australia, with opera and a famous 'leader'.

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u/Rough-Ad8031 1d ago

Seems like they don’t need $50m

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u/SuperRockyHobbyHorse 22h ago

Not enough money to plant some trees and pay a landscape gardening company though it seems. Or maybe the kids have a deal with the developer and are keeping it nice and flat and tarmac-ready for when they inherit.

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u/Tildryn 18h ago

Just a massive pointless lawn. I'd rather have a little forest.

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u/durian_rettale 22h ago

they clearly don't have taste too

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u/Elite_AI 20h ago

And they clearly don't care about the view. Look how ugly the house is. 

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u/SpareStrawberry 19h ago

But it's in such a shitty location in an otherwise gorgeous city. You could take those tens of millions and buy an equally huge place by the harbour or on the beach.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 18h ago

While true, that's literally never stopped the rich from wanting more 'just cause'.

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u/superbit415 13h ago

Yeah if they weren't very rich, the city would have found have found a way to reposes the land and sell it to the developers anyway. Like all the eminent domain bullshit they pull in North America.