Southport’s Woodroffe Hotel sells to company linked to Japanese university for $19.2 million

An unusual buyer has paid more than $19 million for the Gold Coast’s newest hotel. Their plans for the stylish property are even more unusual.

A Japanese university has bought the Gold Coast’s first business hotel, the Woodroffe in Southport, and will use it to house exchange students.

A JAPANESE university has bought the Gold Coast’s first business hotel, the Woodroffe in Southport, and will use it to house exchange students.

The $19.2 million deal has settled, seven months after the boutique White St property quietly was slipped on to the market.

The 103-room hotel, which has 103 rooms, was developed by a company associated with Kevin and Sue Chu and family and opened in late 2017.

Moto Waters, the Ray White agent who handled the sale, yesterday said that the buyer was a company linked to the International University of Health and Welfare.

The university, founded in 1995, has five campuses and in 2017 started a global school of medicine based in Narita.

A Japanese university has bought the Gold Coast’s first business hotel, the Woodroffe in Southport, and will use it to house exchange students.

HOTEL AN UNEXPECTED TRIBUTE TO CITY PIONEER

The university organises co-operative research projects and overseas training programs.

Ms Waters, a piano-playing grandmother who has been selling property for Ray White for 30 years, said the university would use the hotel for exchange student accommodation.

“I believe that when it’s not full, hotel rooms still will be available for guests.”

Ms Waters said the deal was the quickest in her experience.

“The due diligence finished on June 13 and the sale settled on the 14th — the money already was in the country.”

The Woodroffe was built on a site acquired for $1.5 million and which also has a Garden St frontage.

It was approved in 2014, the second project to get the green light in Southport’s priority development area.

The hotel, built by the Southport-based Kyron group, originally was to have a French provincial look and be called the Skygarden Hotel.

The Woodroffe Hotel in Southport was originally going to be called Skygarden and had a provincial style. Photo: Supplied

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It subsequently was redesigned to fit in with the character of the surrounding area and a plan to strata-title it was shelved.

The name was changed to Woodroffe to reflect the name of the nearby Woodroffe Park.

The hotel was booked out for the use of officials, the media, and dignitaries during the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

The Woodroffe sale is not the biggest made by Ms Waters, who sold the Raptis Plaza and an adjoining site to the Juniper group for $33 million in 2002.

That figure looked pale alongside her $87.9 million sale of the Mincom Central tower in Brisbane to a Japanese investor a year earlier.

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