Gold Coast development: Full details of Nerang high-rise tower project pitched by Geoff Burchill
Plans for blue-collar suburb Nerang’s first apartment towers, first pitched by an be back on track, but with a twist.
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PLANS for blue-collar suburb Nerang’s first apartment towers, flagged eight years ago, might be back on track, but with a twist.
The group that’s just bought a Nerang East riverfront site earmarked for the buildings is in the over-50s lifestyle resort business.
It’s the Gold Coast-based GemLife, a partnership set up five years ago between the Puljich family and Singapore’s Thakral group and which has evolved into a slick and well-heeled business that’s operating in three states.
It’s part-way through developing an over-50s resort, with hundreds of homes, on a $30 million Pimpama site.
The group’s not spelling out its intentions for the Nerang East land but it appears it will stick with the tower plan floated eight years and not take the over-50s route.
The seller of the site, property visionary Geoff Burchill, today in his 80s, gained approval in 2015 for four buildings on land he’d owned since 1981.
The buildings, of from seven to 12 levels, were to have 170 apartments.
Geoff believed his project would add new vitality to Nerang and be a catalyst for fresh investment in the township.
His efforts to get the project underway were suspended six years ago when an unsolicited sale of his 2.55ha holding failed to go ahead.
The would-be buyer was a consortium linked to Sydney barrister Elias Tabchouri, of Macquarie Law, and Broadbeach-based app-design company operator Dallas Bayly.
No price was revealed but a consortium spokesman promised quick construction start.
Move ahead six years and a sale finally has been cemented – at $7.75 million to GemLife.
A party to the sale says GemLife initially considered using the land for housing lots.
After all, next door Brisbane group Pointcorp has been having raging success with a similar venture.
Also assessed might have been the viability of going into the build-to-rent business, a property sphere that is mushrooming across Australia and in which the Gold Coast hasn’t been left out.
Developer Ron Bakir is well down the track with a four-tower community at Varsity Lakes that will inject 446 apartments into the city’s rental pool.
At the end of the day, it seems the original Burchill plan – to go vertical – is very much on the agenda.
The Burchill land is on two titles at 7 and 9 Eden Court – one with a five-bedroom home on it and the other with a four-bedroom residence.
The land abuts the former The Villa private golf course.
That’s where Pointcorp, after opting not to take the high road, is undertaking 180-lot estate Riverina, which is racing toward a sellout.
The Villa’s previous owner, Japanese billionaire the late Toshiaki Ogasawara’s Nifsan group, followed in the footsteps of the Burchill tower move by flagging plans for 15 buildings on The Villa land – one of them 30 levels.
There already has been a rash of apartment unit projects in the vicinity of the ex-Burchill land – all benefiting from being close to the Nerang train station.
An opportunity for more development arose last month when Chinese group Songcheng went to market with a site capable of taking more than 300 units.
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Originally published as Gold Coast development: Full details of Nerang high-rise tower project pitched by Geoff Burchill
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