An Australian family is not interested in selling to collect the $33 million their property is worth, and now their yard looks like a park in the middle of a suburban sprawl

• An Australian family refused to sell their house, said to be worth 50 million Australian dollars, or $33 million, for years.
• Rows of two-story homes have been built around the property, making its yard seem like a park.

An Australian home sits alone on 5 acres of land and is estimated to be worth 50 million Australian dollars, or $33 million, Australia's 7News reported.

The property's owners, the Zammits, have refused to sell their house, forcing developers to build around them over the past few years, 7News said.

The home is situated at The Ponds, about a 40-minute drive from the center of Sydney.

A time-lapse video in a tweet shows the castlelike house at a standstill as rows and rows of two-story houses are built around the land over the years, which makes the lawn stick out, as it looks like a park in the suburban sprawl.

"The fact that most people sold out years and years ago, these guys have held on, all credit to them," Taylor Bredin, a real-estate agent, told 7News.

He estimated that the land was big enough for 50 3,200-square-foot houses and that each would be worth 1 million Australian dollars, or almost $700,000.

Diane Zammit, the mother in the Zammit family, told the Daily Mail Australia that the neighborhood used to be "farmland dotted with little red-brick homes and cottages" when her family moved in 17 years ago.

The 5-acre property would have been worth about $3 million 11 years ago, based on the prices of neighboring houses in 2012, the Daily Mail Australia reported.

Some neighbors are glad that the family declined developers' offers and chose to stay.

"I'm very happy they've refused to sell — it means we have a cul-de-sac, which is much safer for our kids — and their big lawn next to us makes it feel like we've got so much space," one told the Daily Mail Australia.

Correction: May 15, 2023 — An earlier version of this story stated the property was worth $50 million and did not note that this was in Australian dollars. The sum has since been converted to US dollars and changed in both the headline and story.