Kyle needed to settle. He had a new $2 million mortgage charging up to 30% interest

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

In this week’s On Background, we reveal Kyle Sandilands’ mortgaged mansion gave him one great reason to settle, a potentially painful court battle looms for Southern Cross Media, Capital Brief expands its press gallery team, and staff at another news outlet weigh a potential strike.

King Kyle’s crumbling castle

In reaching a $12 million settlement with ARN this week, shock jock Kyle Sandilands was after a quick fix for his growing relevance deprivation syndrome.

But he was also after money, fast, because his debts were piling up faster than anyone knew.

You see, Sandilands, he of the multimillion-dollar luxury car collection, is a bloke with expensive (if slightly garish) taste. And he “has mortgages to pay like everyone else”, as the shock jock so bluntly put it outside the Federal Court following a preliminary hearing in March.

It has been widely reported that Sandilands has four of those. There’s a mortgage on the $14 million Vaucluse trophy home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs bought in 2023, a mortgage on the $3 million Southern Highlands farmhouse purchased in 2018, a mortgage on the $1.8 million Copacabana fixer-upper nabbed last year on the NSW Central Coast, and a mortgage on the $3 million Glenorie estate that he acquired in 2022. Those are all from top-tier lender NAB.

But real estate documents obtained by On Background show there’s second mortgage on the Glenorie property, executed on April 24.

That’s more than a month after KIIS-owner ARN stopped paying him, which would go a long way to explaining the brutal terms that Sandilands accepted on the mortgage to let him borrow up to $2 million. The “lower” rate of interest on the loan is 19.75 per cent a year, but it gets worse: the “higher rate” is an eye-watering 29.75 per cent.

It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t in dire need of cash accepting those brutal rates.

But here’s the kicker: Sandilands couldn't even get the full $2 million technically available under the........

© Brisbane Times