From boarding school naughty boy to multi-millionaire, Consolidated Property’s Don O’Rorke has had quite a ride
Nick named the “baby-faced assassin”, this leading Queensland businessman now has his sights set on building a $1 billion surf stadium and resort
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“You’re on this perfect wave that goes for nearly a kilometre – it’s just mind blowing.”
Don O’Rorke, executive chairman of Consolidated Properties Group, is describing his attempt to carve up the man-made surfing nirvana dubbed “Disneyland for surfers”.
The avid surfer and one of Queensland’s most successful developers has dropped in to test the waters at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch at Lemoore in California.
He’s staring down the barrel of one of the most talked about things in surfing since Slater himself.
The glassy, six-foot wall of water he has paddled into has risen from the depths of a state-of-the-art wave pool created by the world champion surfer and a team of top engineering minds.
“It’s somewhat surreal,” O’Rorke says.
“The facility is four hours’ drive inland from Los Angeles. It’s the equivalent of going out to Roma for a surf.”
The ultimate ride is a minute-long surfing odyssey, going with the flow of 55 million fast-moving litres of freshwater from one end of the Surf Ranch’s rectangular lagoon to the other.
That’s assuming, of course, you don’t wipeout.
Even Slater fell trying to surf the first wave produced at the Leemore facility, which started as a 2-inch wave in a university lab before being scaled up into a surfable prototype.
Modestly rating himself as an enthusiastic amateur, O’Rorke confesses: “I don’t think I completed any of my waves on the first day.
“It’s not an inconsequential wave you’re catching,” he explains. “Not only is it a perfect wave, it’s a powerful wave … with barrelling sections and open face sections. It’s really challenging but amazing.”
O’Rorke’s first out-of-ocean surfing experience was clearly a big adrenaline rush.
By the time his second visit came around in September – to watch the world’s best surfers hit the artificial surf break for the Freshwater Pro – a surge of developer dopamine had kicked in.
Consolidated Properties had quietly forged a partnership with the World Surf League – pro surfing’s governing body and a major stakeholder in the Kelly Slater Wave Company – to bring a $1.1 billion surf stadium and resort to Queensland.
With an uncanny calmness O’Rorke has never been afraid to jump in the deep end of the property development pool.
Over the past four decades, his Brisbane-based company has developed more than 200 projects – everything from CBD office towers and apartment high-rises to shopping centres, business parks and residential subdivisions – from Cooktown in far north Queensland to Victoria’s Philip Island.
On some of the earlier developments its 58-year-old boss candidly admits “we actually didn’t know anything and were making it up as we went along”.
“You’ve got to have a dream and you’ve got to believe in it, back it with money and then sweat the detail,” he says.
As for delivering his latest dream – well, let’s just say O’Rorke knows some people.
One of them just happens to be Andrew Stark, the former boss of Surfing Australia where O’Rorke had a 12-year tenure as a board member. Together, they were the driving force behind the sport’s first high performance centre at Casuarina Beach, a beachfront enclave developed by Consolidated Properties on the Tweed coast.
In his latest role as the local head honcho of the WSL, Stark has been looking up and down Australia’s east coast for a suitable location to replicate Slater’s Californian Surf Ranch, widely regarded as the world’s best artificial wave system.
As luck would have it, Consolidated Properties has a spare 510ha development site at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast, a place steeped in surfing culture and deemed a “perfect fit” by Slater.
With the $100 million-plus wave pool as its centrepiece, the plan is to transform the former cane land into a major tourism drawcard with a 10-year multistage integrated development that also includes a luxury solar-powered eco-lodge and other accommodation, restaurant/bar precinct with a destination venue akin to The Farm at Byron Bay, a retail village and environmental education centre.
“While people will come primarily for the Surf Ranch experience, it can only exist if it’s part of a much larger project and much broader experience than just riding a wave,” O’Rorke says.
If the proposal garners a groundswell of support – crucially from the local community and government – construction could begin as early as mid-next year. Not only would it be a sporting tourism coup as Slater’s first Surf Ranch outside the US, it would also give Queensland another string to its bow for its 2032 Olympics bid.
O’Rorke says from its beginnings the ethos of Consolidated Properties has always been about “being adventurous, inquisitive and taking on something new”.
The company was born out of his working relationship with colleagues David Watson, Revon King and Steve Tyson during his days as a commercial leasing manager with CBRE.
Curiously, it was established with an entity originally called “Foxy Lady on First Avenue”.
Another founding partner, architect Kerry O’Rourke, registered it in 1979 for his wife’s Sunshine Coast dress shop. He changed the name a few years later to Consolidated Properties, inspired by then high-flying business tycoon Kerry Packer’s Consolidated Press.
The company’s first project was a Westpac bank at Lutwyche on Brisbane’s northside, which O’Rorke says they got off the ground using credit card debt and ultimately “made two bits of f--k all out of it”.
Its breakthrough development came in the late 1980s after winning the tender for the Commonwealth Law Courts in Brisbane. It never looked back.
“We went from doing projects up to $10 million to a $130 million development in one giant leap,” O’Rorke recalls.
Things did get somewhat choppy, however, in the mid-2000s after the company’s merger with the publicly-listed Trinity Ltd that ended in an acrimonious split.
But the “baby-faced assassin” – as O’Rorke is known in the industry – has prevailed and with the ranks of the company’s five founding partners thinning over the years he is its last original man standing.
“We all had different aspirations, different appetites for risk and we all found our own level,” O’Rorke says.
Now one of Australia’s most active development companies, Consolidated Properties has a $2 billion-plus development pipeline over the next five years, including two big Brisbane projects – the $850 million Yeerongpilly Green riverside urban renewal precinct and a recently-approved striking new $250 million office tower at 895 Ann St, Fortitude Valley.
O’Rorke, an art lover and collector, says he is always inspired by good design, architecture and “just looking at interesting buildings”. A number of his company’s developments have been lauded with accolades – in recent times, most notably its 40-level Spire Residences at 550 Queens St designed by John Wardle Architects.
Born in the small town of Esk, about 100km north-west of Brisbane, O’Rorke was only seven-years-old when his Scottish father, who before migrating to Australia was an arts and literature lecturer at Edinburgh University, died unexpectedly from a blood disorder.
He credits his mother, who managed several businesses in the town as well as the family’s 325ha farm, for giving him “a sense of entrepreneurship, a sense of taking risks and a sense of having to get off my butt”.
“I’ve always been happy to have a go at things,” he says. That includes catching his first wave as a 10-year-old while holidaying on the southern Gold Coast – leading to his lifelong love of surfing.
But O’Rorke also admits he was “such a little sh-t” his mother sent him to boarding school a year early.
It was at Brisbane Boys College he met his good mate Scott Hutchinson – now chairman of Hutchinson Builders, which for 30 years has partnered with Consolidated Properties on all its projects.
“Don has got one of the most clear-thinking, brilliant minds I’ve ever known,” Hutchinson muses with a caveat. “But only within the realm of property – we’ll leave it at that.”
He recalls at school O’Rorke was “always happy, whatever sh-t was going down”.
The friendship has lasted longer than both O’Rorke’s marriages – from which he has seven children – and Hutchinson says it has endured not only because they share similar core values but also “the same sense of fun”.
O’Rorke adds with a chuckle: “We’ve been through a lot together – good, bad, naughty and ugly”.
But they do have their differences. One doesn’t want to be a builder and the other doesn’t want to be a developer. Also, O’Rorke’s passion is surfing and Hutchinson’s obsession is music.
For the past 22 years O’Rorke and a bunch of his boardriding mates have been escaping the tide of daily life by travelling to Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands and hopping on a boat for a two week-long surfari. This year the average age was 60 and, according to the surf-mad developer, they are all “still riding shortboards and paddling out into big Indo waves”.
“As long as your body allows it and in your head you say ‘I can do it’ … I would hate to think I couldn’t do it one day.”
O’Rorke pauses. “Surfing is an important part of my life and I don’t do it as much as I’d like to,” he laments.
Soon, however, he may not have to travel so far to catch the perfect wave.
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