The days of million-dollar TV salaries are over, prompting highly paid news personalities and execs to consolidate their wealth ahead of earlier-than-expected retirements and amid declining demand for their services.<\/p>\n
During the past seven months, against a backdrop of plummeting TV revenues, some of television\u2019s biggest names have offloaded homes to capitalise on this still-buoyant real estate market. <\/p>\n
This week, one-time breakfast show host Samantha Armytage sold her house in Moss Vale in the NSW Southern Highlands.<\/p>\n
The sale, for $2.1 to $2.3 million, came weeks after Armytage sold a Hyams Beach home <\/a>on the NSW South Coast in March for $2.75 million.<\/p>\n With lucrative on-screen jobs fast drying up in television, former Seven star Armytage, who took a pay cut to sign with Nine in 2024 for a stint hosting The Golden Bachelor, looks to be building a war chest in anticipation of the uncertain years ahead.<\/p>\n The presenter, who turns 50 in September, isn\u2019t the only former breakfast television identity playing the real estate market.<\/p>\n Ex-Today show anchor Lisa Wilkinson sold the Cremorne family home<\/a> she shared with media writer husband Peter FitzSimons in October for an undisclosed sum after going to market with$23 million expectations.<\/p>\n The couple then swiftly picked up a waterfront $15 million penthouse apartment with harbour views in nearby Mosman in November.<\/p>\n Former ABC Breakfast host Michael Rowland also put the family home on the market last spring before selling it in November.<\/p>\n After 39 years at the national broadcaster, Rowland, 57, retired in February \u2013 14 months after stepping down from ABC Breakfast in what was widely seen as an internal push for generational change.<\/p>\n Rowland\u2019s four-bedroom family home in Yarraville, Melbourne, ended up selling for $2.47 million, with those funds subsequently financing he and wife Nicki\u2019s midlife tree-change.<\/p>\n The couple now call Tewantin, near Noosa, home.<\/p>\n Seven\u2019s prime-time newsreader Mark Ferguson also consolidated his property investments in October with the sale of a family farm near Crookwell in the Southern Tablelands for $8.5 million.<\/p>\n That sale came just months before Ferguson had his newsreading shifts at Seven cut back, after 17 years, to four nights a week in line with widespread pay cuts being handed out across the board at Seven.<\/p>\n Ferguson and wife Jayne also own a terrace in Paddington that they originally picked up for $3.2 million in 2014, the year his career was on the upswing after he was promoted to the coveted role of Seven\u2019s prime-time Sydney newsreader.<\/p>\n That was also the year the couple bought the now divested 777 hectare cattle property.<\/p>\n Nine\u2019s long-time former national director of news Darren Wick is the latest to put his home on the market.<\/p>\n Wick\u2019s three-bedroom, two-bathroom oceanfront apartment at Narrabeen Beach was advertised last month.<\/p>\n Featuring 180 degree views and a beachside swimming pool, the property goes to auction next week with expectations in the mid $3 million range.<\/p>\n After three decades at Nine, Wick left the broadcaster in March 2024.<\/p>\n A month later, as brutal cost cutting hit rival broadcaster Seven, Wick\u2019s Seven news counterpart Craig McPherson pulled the plug on his 25-year TV career.<\/p>\n Having invested shrewdly with TV star wife Sonia Kruger in the affluent Sydney suburb of Mosman years earlier \u2013 and undertaken a lavish million-dollar renovation of the family home \u2013 McPherson would replace long days at Seven\u2019s Eveleigh bunker with shorter ones as a burgeoning project manager and real estate prospector.<\/p>\n Having tripled their money buying, renovating and selling their first Mosman home which they sold at the start of 2025 for about $20 million, McPherson and Kruger \u2013 the highly prized and paid host of Seven\u2019s The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, Big Brother and Holey Moley \u2013 splashed out $16 million on a Balmoral Slopes knockdown with gun-barrel views of North Head.<\/p>\n Father of seven McPherson has spent the past year in semi-retirement working with architects and fending off neighbour complaints concerning the construction of a $7 million, four-storey mansion (with two swimming pools) \u2013 the future sale of which, pending 60-year-old Kruger\u2019s own future, should guarantee the couple a very comfortable retirement.<\/p>\n Billionaire Gretel Packer moves to safeguard daughter with strict prenup<\/p>\n Proud mother-of-the-bride Gretel Packer has a reputation for being a sentimental softie when it comes to preserving her parents\u2019 legacies.<\/p>\n When it comes to prenups, not so much.<\/p>\n After two marriages \u2013 her first to British financier Nicholas Barham lasted eight years, while her second to Avalon hippie Shane Murray struggled to make three \u2013 the fiercely protective Packer is understood to have left nothing to chance concerning her only daughter Francesca Packer Barham\u2019s marriage to failed wellness entrepreneur Robert Bates<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to well-placed sources, the devoted mother-of-three, who has proven herself a canny investor after amassing a personal fortune approaching $3 billion, has had more than a passing hand in helping to draft the prenuptial agreement that will safeguard her daughter\u2019s future inheritance, should Francesca\u2019s marriage to Bates fail.<\/p>\n It had been the dying wish of Gretel\u2019s father, media magnate Kerry Packer \u2013 that his only daughter set aside her romantic nature in 2004 and protect herself financially by insisting her then-fiance, self-styled spiritual guru Murray, sign one.<\/p>\n It would take years \u2013 and a battle that finally ended in 2010 \u2013 before Gretel\u2019s lawyers reached a settlement with Murray that finally made him a footnote to her life.<\/p>\n At the time, that settlement was put at around $5 million, though the precise amount has never been made public.<\/p>\n Regardless, it was sufficient to buy Murray an apartment valued at $1.3 million in Sydney\u2019s leafy Rose Bay, probably too close for Packer, who would raise her children just streets away in the next suburb, and an investment property.<\/p>\n