Developers set their sights on Brisbane’s bowls clubs
AS suburban bowls clubs lose memberships and struggle to survive, retirement home developers are offering them a lifeline, but not everyone is happy about that.
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THE sleepy suburban bowls club is under threat. Amid declining memberships, the clubs have been struggling to survive as city populations swell around their tightly manicured greens.
But they may have been thrown a lifeline.
Developers with a keen eye have been propositioning struggling bowls clubs for several years with a view to redevelop a chunk of their land into unit complexes.
However, in Brisbane, even that has faced its share of controversy. Back in 2004, Indooroopilly Bowls Club was sold to a development consortium, which built a new club house and greens in exchange for redeveloping the existing 13,000sq m of land. But the club continued to struggle under mounting debt until it was forced to close in 2014.
More recently, an application to redevelop part of the heritage-listed Yeronga Bowls Club was knocked back by council on December 9.
In order to survive, the club wanted to sell one of its greens to Lennium Group developers to build a 50-unit residential complex, but the application was refused in part over concerns over building height.
Despite this setback, all is not lost.
In August this year, Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk announced council would slash infrastructure charges and relax building height rules for retirement villages to attract them to inner suburbs.
“The reality is we can’t just have our retirement villages and aged care facilities on the outskirts of the city,” Quirk said. “That’s not meeting the needs of our ageing residents.
Cr Quirk hopes to meet a demand stemming from an extra 45,040 Brisbane residents predicted to expand the city’s ageing population to 135,120 by 2027.
The numbers translate into big business. A recent IBIS World report projected a 10 per cent annual growth in retirement villages from 2017-22, with the report finding the sector made profits of $200 million in the year up until August, 2016.
Developers have taken note. The Lennium Group, which wanted to redevelop the Yeronga Bowls Club, has already flagged plans to resubmit a development application to build a retirement home on the site instead.
But first, everyone is watching what is happening in Tarragindi. Residents there are rallying against Retire Australia’s plans to build a six-storey “seniors’ housing” complex with 95 units that will absorb the Tarragindi Bowls Club. One of the club’s two bowling greens would be retained under the proposal, which includes new club facilities on the 1.3ha of land.
Tarragindi Residents Alliance president Liza Wieland says the group’s main concerns are the project’s size.
“The problem is the building is only 15m from our fence line,” Wieland says. “They say it is 30m from our property but that’s from my back wall instead of the property line. This entire neighbourhood is zoned low density under the council’s neighbourhood plan but this is clearly medium density.”
Council responded to the opposition by flagging concerns with the developer, which has resubmitted designs that lower the maximum height to five storeys.
Retire Australia CEO Alison Quinn says the group had been in discussions with the bowls club for two years before a deal was reached for a 100-year lease.
“Because we have difficulty securing new sites for development opportunities, we started reaching out to what we thought were good partners to work with to enable seniors’ housing to be delivered,” Quinn says.
“What we found was many sporting clubs questioning whether they could remain sustainable in the long term based only on membership fees.”
Retire Australia, a for-profit organisation, have set up another proposal with the Ashgrove Golf Club to redevelop part of its land. That project aims to build about 150 retirement units overlooking the golf course from Waterworks Rd. However, a development application is yet to be submitted.
The Tarragindi proposal is the only formal application seeking to capitalise on the retirement discounts to date, but the experts predict there will be many more.
Hynes Legal director Leo Hopsick was involved in the original Tarragindi agreements, as well as five other proposals between cash-strapped clubs and aged care or retirement-living developers.
He says council’s incentive scheme was the catalyst in a perfect storm of conditions to address an undersupply of seniors’ housing.
“The market for aged-care and retirement living was getting tougher as it became more competitive,” Hopsick says. “But one of the best ways to improve your product is to have a good site location because you’re going to get a better price for what you sell.”
While the Tarragindi club is one of the larger developments, Aura boss Tim Russell says not all retirement-living complexes need to be big.
The seniors’ housing developer was part of a proposal to transform council-owned Everton Park Bowls Club land into a 50-unit retirement complex while still retaining bowling facilities.
But that idea was squashed by council.
Russell says that the group has since turned its attention to clubs with freehold land and is now reviewing three other opportunities for aged-care developments.
Council have been firm in ruling out incentives for developments that want to use council-owned land.
The use of sports fields has drawn some criticism too.
At one of the final meetings of the year, councillors voted to change the Brisbane City Plan 2014 to allow aged care developments on land zoned for sports fields.
The move sparked criticism from Opposition Leader Cr Peter Cumming, who warned the city’s sporting area could be replaced by aged care facilities under the new rules.
Council rejects this, restating its focus on helping struggling clubs already under pressure to survive.
“Part of this amendment makes increased height limits in medium and high-density residential areas code assessable for aged-care facilities,” Cumming says. “So in a medium-density zone with a five-storey limit, developers could propose an aged-care facility that is seven storeys and residents would have no right to object,” Cumming says.
And that is an issue sure to be debated as more seniors’ housing applications come before council.
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