Personal training and energy boss Kevin Kalinko behind $22m+ North Bondi apartment block sale

News Corp Australia Network

Personal training and energy boss Kevin Kalinko is behind the recent $22m+ North Bondi apartment block sale.

With a guide of $15m, it had initially been thought that a boutique developer had snapped up 154 Brighton Boulevard, owned by Holocaust survivor the late Naftali ‘Neff’ Kirsch and his late wife, Rose, since 1965.

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And Raine and Horne Double Bay/Bondi Beach principal Ric Serrao and Laing and Simmons Double Bay’s Steven Zoellner, who haven’t revealed the August 1 purchaser, had laughed off suggestions it may have been Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar, who had just sold the company to US fintech giant Square for $39 billion.

Buyer’s agent, Simon Cohen, who’d introduced the purchaser was also tongue-tied citing confidentiality agreements.

But a caveat placed on the title for the block of six this week shows the purchaser is Kalinko’s wife, Michelle Kalinko.

Kevin Kalinko is the owner of fitness education provider Australian Institute of Personal Trainers and executive director of energy management company The Energy Alliance.

CoreLogic indicates the couple reside at five-bedroom home with pool in Captain Pipers Road, Vaucluse, purchased for $3.5m in 2013.

The duplex next door to the flats, 156 Brighton Boulevard, was also owned by the Kirschs and that’s now scheduled for August 24 auction with a guide of about $20m.

The Kirschs had “come with nothing” when they arrived in Sydney 70 years ago, their daughter, Sonya, told the Wentworth Courier exclusively when the properties first went on the market.

Neff, a Polish Jew, had been interned in the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and Rose was penniless and stateless as a Jew forced from Egypt.

They spoke eight languages between them but no English.

Yet through hard work — Neff initially digging trenches for the government and later a plumber and Rose a dressmaker and sales lady at Anthony Hordern — they managed to scrape together the 50,000 pounds for the cottage that originally stood at No. 154 in 1965, replaced with flats four years later.

When the duplex came up for sale in 1971 next door at No. 156, they bought that too.

The family initially lived in a top-floor apartment overlooking the beach, later moving to the top-floor duplex next door.

They moved to the downstairs level in their latter years and rented out all the other properties.

Neff passed away in 2015 and Rose a year later.