The Hongcouver | Former duck farmer from China revealed as buyer of US$40 million Vancouver mansion
Low-profile tycoon Chen Mailin, a member of the CPPCC, may have made the biggest home purchase in Canadian real estate history
Who is Chen Mailin? He’s gone from being a duck farmer, to a hotelier, to the head of a skyscraper-building conglomerate and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
The 45-year-old Jiangsu-province businessman is now also the owner of one of Vancouver’s grandest homes, a 17,000 sq ft Italianate mansion on 1.1ha in Point Grey, sales documents revealed last week. The C$51.8 million (HK$315 million, US$40 million) price makes it one of the city’s most expensive homes; it also may represent the single biggest residential transaction ever conducted in Canada, although the nature of private sales make this difficult to prove.
The home at 4787 Drummond Drive was built on what was once three separate lots by the computer games mogul Don Mattrick - formerly of Entertainment Arts (EA) and Microsoft, and now CEO of Zynga – and his wife, telecoms heiress Nanon de Gaspe Beaubien-Mattrick.
