Christie Leet has Rainbow Bay site in sights

A Whitsundays property agency boss who is also sporting a developer’s hat, has his foot on a southern Coast site.

CHRISTIE Leet, a Whitsundays property agency boss who is also sporting a developer’s hat, is turning his back on the high road at Coolangatta.

The 52-year-old, from the Whitsundays, has his foot on a site on the southern side of Rainbow Bay.

The property, for which Christie’s Sherpa Investments is believed to be paying $11.35 million later this year, is zoned for high-density development but Christie has “small” ideas.

His formula for the land, which looks across a park to the Jack Evans boat harbour, is to subdivide it and build 16 houses.

Sunset Strip Holiday Lodge. Picture: Scott Powick

The two and three-level abodes would sit on blocks of from 200 to 250sqm – still big enough for each one to have outdoor verandahs and pools.

The 3947sqm Leet site, which has frontages to Boundary St and Eden Ave and is across the road from the Greenmount resort, is rectangular and easy to cut into a subdivision with a bisecting road.

It’s home to two buildings that make up the Sunset Strip motel and which today are operating as semi-permanent accommodation venues.

They’ll continue in that vein, at least until Christie finds out whether the city council gives his plan the green light.

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The two motel titles have proven an astute buy by Stewart Consolidations, whose director is 86-year-old Hunter Valley woman Janice Stewart – they were bought for $1.3 million in 1995.

The Coolangatta venture isn’t the first one in which Christie has shown an ability to think outside the square.

He’s building four homes on a 1012sqm holding at Bilinga – two of them beachfront.

They, like the planned Rainbow Bay homes, are being built under Christie’s Freedom Beach Homes brand.

Sunset Strip Holiday Lodge. Picture: Scott Powick

Meanwhile, the logic of the head of PRDnationwide Whitsundays when it comes to the Coolangatta foray appears to be built around a view that not everyone desires to live in an apartment.

One of the reasons for that view is that many people do not want the hassles that come with body-corporate living.

Nor do they want the expense of body-corporate fees, which in many buildings top $200 a week.

Christie’s option of ‘shoe-horning’ people into apartments is his freehold homes, which will be larger than most apartments and will, it appears, be on the upper side of the market price-wise.

They are being tipped to start from $1.4 million when the project is launched, probably next month.

Sunset Strip Holiday Lodge. Picture: Scott Powick

The Freedom Beach Homes plan is, of course, subject to the project getting development approval, which might come by June, with civil works starting the following month.

Meanwhile, Rainbow Bay has two other developments on the boil but they’re high ones, not in the Christie mould.

The Sunland Group is still working up its plans for the Greenmount resort site.

At the other end of Marine Pde, Brisbane developer Paul Gedoun is seeking the nod for Flow, a luxury 12-floor tower which appears to have drawn more buyers than there are apartments.