SA Weekend cover story: Leading builder Ross Pelligra reveals his grand plans for our state
Ross Pelligra has seized on what he describes as a huge opportunity in South Australia. But he is only getting started. Today in SA Weekend, he reveals his grand plans for the state.
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It was at Adelaide Oval in 2016 watching his Geelong team take on the Crows when Ross Pelligra started to think that South Australia may just have something to offer. And not just because the Cats won the game.
Pelligra’s property development and construction company had extensive investments in his home state of Victoria as well as in NSW and Queensland, but SA was a blank slate.
“I was surprised about how Adelaide wasn’t the country town that everyone made it out to be,” Pelligra remembers.
“I hadn’t been here for a while, so I was just surprised about how big the city was, actually that the CBD is probably one of the biggest CBDs, in land mass, in Australia.”
But he also found something else.
“It’s honest. It’s hard working. It’s genuine. People here really want to make things happen,” he says.
Pelligra sensed an opportunity. He had the financial muscle of a three-generation company behind him and decided he could bring a “volume” of projects to Adelaide that was beyond what local business could provide.
Five years later, he has lived up to that promise.
Pelligra’s first foray into Adelaide was a residential project at Largs North.
Since then he has bought the Holden site at Elizabeth, the old Wakefield Hospital, a high-end apartment block on Rundle St, the Adelaide 36ers arena, office buildings at 80 King William St, 157 Grenfell St and at 89 Pirie St.
Pelligra also has also bought a baseball team, the Adelaide Giants, and plans to build it a new city-fringe stadium and is working with the Adelaide Crows to build its new administration and training centre in the inner-west. Oh, and he’s piling in $50m to build a golf course and luxury accommodation on Kangaroo Island.
“I think there’s 20 years of growth in South Australia,” Pelligra says in the boardroom of the recently renovated office at 89 Pirie St. The striking Pirie St building has been there since 1878 and has been extensively renovated. Pelligra plans to open a rooftop bar next year.
It’s fair to say Ross Pelligra has become something of a fan of South Australia.
Pelligra is one of life’s enthusiasts.
“Passionate” is a word he uses a lot. But there are other themes that pepper the conversation. “Build it and they will come” is one. He also talks a lot about the need for “patient” capital. That is to say, he is not here chasing cheap returns, but is in it for the long haul.
“In property if you take a short-term view, you will fail,” he says. “There’s no two, three or five year horizon. You’re very lucky (if that works), you’re one in a 100.”
It’s a point the 43-year-old emphasises when he talks about his potential deal with the Adelaide Crows to build a training and administration base at the site of the former gasworks in Brompton.
There will also be a commercial and residential development if the project wins approval (the plan was scuttled on Thursday, after this interview had gone to press, with Melbourne-based developer MAB Corporation had been selected to rejuvenate the 6ha site over 10 years, with construction works set to begin in the second half of this year.)
The Pelligra name covers its own generations in the development and construction world.
The business was started by Ross Pelligra’s grandfather, also Ross, who left Sicily in 1958 to move to Melbourne. The government was desperate for migrants.
“He got an instant citizenship. They got help to set up bank accounts. There was capital available to invest in buying a house and creating jobs and it was very open.”
Pelligra senior arrived to find Melbourne on the cusp of boom population times.
The Pelligra business started in fruit shops and convenience stores. Then they moved into property development and construction as Melbourne grew. In the decade from 1960, Melbourne’s population grew by more than a third.
The business expanded as Ross Pelligra senior’s brothers joined him from Italy.
Then the second generation signed up, then the third. A fourth is now also making its way in the business.
Ross Pelligra junior left school in year 10 to join the family business. Not that it was the end of his formal education. Pelligra tells SA Weekend he “effectively ended up getting 11 degrees” in fields as diverse as construction, development, business management, real estate and hospitality. He would work during the day in the business and go to trade school and Victoria University at night.
“I was always passionate about completing and executing an outcome, so for me it was about getting that qualification,” he says. “It was actually a very good learning tool for me because it taught me the discipline of having common practice and also the education side of it, the two of them came together.”
Pelligra became chairman of the company in 2010 and has seen it expand further in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, as well as into China and India.
The company first came to notice to South Australians in late 2017 when it outlined a $250m plan to transform the old Holden plant at Elizabeth into a modern manufacturing hub.
The fate of the iconic 125ha site had been much discussed after US car giant General Motors announced in 2013 it was abandoning manufacturing in Elizabeth, but Pelligra says he didn’t want to abandon the “local money, the local investment, the local hard work that went in from all the hard working families to deliver a big manufacturing plant”.
And he thought his family had the expertise to make it work.
“We have a history of owning industrial, brownfield dinosaur assets so our family knows how to convert them, decontaminate them, clean them and put them in a perspective where the assets can be quick entry for a start-up business or emerging business where they can have accommodation very quickly,” he says.
Unlike many others who have been freely tipping the demise of the industry for a long time, as places such as Holden disappeared, Pelligra says he believes there is a bright future for Australian manufacturing.
“It’s not a foreign thing for the Australian people to understand manufacturing, because we grew up around the table at home where your father, grandfather, was manufacturing,” he says.
Pelligra just believes that the new manufacturing industry has to be built on brains, skills and technology, rather than just sweat and muscle.
“We are no longer grease monkeys,” he says.
The key, he says, is investment in modern plant and equipment. In robotics and innovation. Australia can’t compete on labour costs with cheaper nations in Asia, but, he says, even nations such as China which relied on a bargain-basement workforce are placing their future in the hands of technology, mainly because it’s more reliable than the human factor.
“It’s changed now in Australia, because the government’s now behind manufacturing, for sovereign risk. You’ve got finances, you’ve got landlords, you’ve got capacity.
“We’ve got the resources, we’ve got the IP (intellectual property), so it’s now just a matter of putting manufacturing into play again and investing in it.”
Pelligra believes the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted global supply lines, has been important for manufacturing as it highlighted Australia’s need to again be more self-sufficient and less reliant on the rest of the world.
Pelligra also says a move to renewable energy is vital for future manufacturing. He is certainly backing that view, investing a billion dollars in renewable projects across Australia.
“If we don’t take advantage of renewable energy, and take the 20, 30, 50-year horizon investment, we’re going to be paying for fossil fuels that are going to continue polluting our environment,” he says.
“There’s technology out there which can be adapted immediately because of our beautiful bright sun that we have. We can get guaranteed at least so many hours a day. Solar works. Renewable energy works. Hydrogen works.”
The Holden site, which has been renamed Lionsgate, is around 80 per cent full at the moment. The idea of using some of the site to build electric cars has been floated by the British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta, who owns the Whyalla steelworks, but Pelligra says although discussions are happening nothing is imminent on that front.
Gupta, of course, has had his own problems of late after the collapse of his financier Greensill Capital left him scrambling to save his global company.
Pelligra and Gupta are mates and the Australian says the Brit will bounce back.
“I am his landlord in multiple sites and talk to him regularly,” he says. “He’s taken on a big task but he will complete it. I know Sanjeev is a fighter and a survivor. He will make Whyalla and everything’s he’s invested in South Australia happen.”
Even during the pandemic, Pelligra was a regular visitor to Adelaide. All the projects that were piling up made him eligible for entry. He’s been here often enough to start picking up on some of Adelaide’s peculiarities. Such as the never-ending debate about how to make best use out of the parklands.
It’s an argument Pelligra is likely to have to navigate as he seeks a site for his Adelaide Giants baseball team. Pelligra bought the team this year from the Adelaide Crows and renamed it from the Bite to the Giants.
He has already announced that he will spend $40m building a 5000-seat stadium for it.
Sites including Victoria Park, the Riverbank precinct, between the Royal Adelaide and the Torrens, and beside the Santos stadium at Mile End have all been floated as potential locations. Other parklands spots adjacent to Greenhill Rd are also possibilities.
Pelligra says he understands that “it’s important that we protect our public spaces”.
“We also get to the heritage, the beauty, the nature – I’m all for that, and I believe in it because we don’t want to create a concrete jungle,” he says.
But Pelligra also says we have to talk about how we define that public space and what we are preserving it for and how we present it so it’s enjoyed by the maximum number of people.
“You don’t want to mow just grass,” he says.
“I think there’s a lot of parklands and potentially there could be some more public infrastructure being built on that the public can enjoy.
“Make it a place where people go there for an event in the parklands and celebrate the parklands.
“And still it’s a public space. Celebrate it.”
Pelligra is a fan of the state government’s plan to build an arena on the railyards near the Torrens and believes that is the kind of infrastructure the city needs.
“If you’re going to be serious about being an international city, and you want to effectively secure the future for the next 100 years, because that’s what the investment will be, you need to be serious about building that sort of infrastructure.”
Pelligra is not in the business of criticising others but believes that maybe just not enough good ideas have been presented to government about how to best use the parklands.
“There hasn’t been enough entrepreneurs that have come up with great ideas to help government realise the infrastructure they have got,” he says.
“I think they need to speak out as entrepreneurs, with ideas, because the government can deliver only on outcomes that people ask for, and bring to the table.”
There is no question that Pelligra is heavily invested in all his South Australian projects.
He talks with great enthusiasm about them all, but his passion goes to an even greater level when talking about his $50m plans for a golf course and accommodation on Kangaroo Island.
The Cliffs will run along KI’s southern coast with holes along the cliff tops between Pelican Lagoon and Pennington Bay.
“I am so privileged and thankful and feel blessed that I’m actually involved in that project,” he says. “Yeah, that will be spectacular.”
Pelligra owns a shopping centre in the upmarket NSW coastal town of Byron Bay and believes KI can be South Australia’s equivalent.
“It’s the real Australia,” Pelligra says of KI. “I think for the families and the hard work that’s gone into Kangaroo Island over the last decade it’s just remarkable, they have done a sensational job to retain Australia on that island.”
It’s not just KI that excites Pelligra. He is something of a sport nut. He is redeveloping the old Findon basketball stadium as the Adelaide 36ers arena, which will be the team’s training and administration base, as well as a community hub. Alongside his ownership of the Adelaide Giants, he is a shareholder in the South Melbourne soccer club which plays at the level below the A-League.
“I love sport,” he says. “Any chance or any sport I can watch or go to a game, it doesn’t matter. It’s from soccer, to football, to baseball, to cricket, to tennis, swimming, car racing, boxing. Anything that’s competition I love to watch.”
But he also believes that sport is important for children, mental health and community cohesion, especially as the state tries to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic.
Pelligra says he worries there could be a “lost generation” of children in a society that has endured lockdowns, working from home, and imposed isolation. He is concerned it may lead to a societal dislocation as people could lose the ability to interact with each other.
“Covid has almost zombied the world,” he says.
“Sport is so important to me, because I think sport will fix that problem. You need something that’s going to boost you out. The adrenalin of sport. Doesn’t give you time to think of depression.”
Despite that, Pelligra believes South Australia has handled the pandemic well and the state is well placed to capitalise on that.
He cautions, though that South Australia must play to its own strengths and not copy the bigger cities in the eastern states.
He says South Australia should concentrate on building an “entrepreneur specialty” and focus on food, agriculture, defence, space, sport, manufacturing and technology.
But, he also says, South Australians have to sell the place as well. His only real gripe, he says, is that he can’t shop in a supermarket before 11am on a Sunday morning.
“I think that the community, from business leaders, to property developers to leaders within the community, need to drum up that South Australia is a city that’s growing and emerging. We’re affordable. We’re willing to work with you. The exact experience that I’ve had over the last five years.”
Pelligra’s enthusiasm just keeps going.
”Yeah, I am overwhelmed.” ■
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