Bond University buys land for $13.97m after turning over $20m of profit in one year

Bond University has paid almost $14m for a parcel of land that once changed hands for considerably more.

THERE are widely differing ‘degrees’ of success and failure in property investment, as the powers that be at Bond University might have observed.

Twelve years ago a site spanning 7063sq m, in Lake St and not too far from Bond, changed hands for $2.31 million.

The fellow who bought it, a Vietnamese refugee, must have felt he’d won Lotto when a Chinese group rolled up eight years later and paid him a whopping $26.4 million.

He had, in the intervening period, won approval for an eight-level tower with 123 apartments, a restaurant and retail space.

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The Chinese buyer, a company called Bondbao, had visions of undertaking the project.

Bondbao, owned by Shenzhen resident Ying Hua, went out looking for a development partner and was talking to Gallery Homes but a deal couldn’t be agreed.

The vision remained over the horizon and the site quietly was slipped on to the market, with Bondbao having had project approval extended to 2023.

Bond has stepped up and bought it for $13.97 million – or at discount of more than $12 million to the price paid by Bondbao.

The uni, which ran at a $20.8 million profit in 2020, already had a foothold in Lake St.

Back in 2016 it bought 1.54ha at No. 4 in a $13.45 million deal.

Bond isn’t saying boo about its plans for its two sites but says it plans for the longer term and that, despite the Covid pandemic, it remains optimistic about the future of higher education in southeast Queensland.

Its ‘optimistic’ approach has also seen it open its wallet in major ways in neighbouring suburb Robina.

More than $20 million has been spent since 2012 buying the six-level former Gold Coast Titans Centre of Excellence and adjoining land.

The refugee who made a giant profit out of selling his Lake St site to Bondbao was Nhan Doan, who arrived in Australia more than four decades ago.

His property agent, in an understatement at the time of the sale, said finding a buyer for the land at more than $26 million made Nhan ‘a very lucky man’.

Nhan apparently arrived in the country with virtually nothing more than the shirt on his back.

Prior to the Lake St buy, he’d built spec homes on the Gold Coast and subsequently built a sellout 120-apartment project in Brisbane.

He’d also owned a riverfront lot in Benowa’s Cabana Boulevard.

Cabana Boulevard, Benowa Waters.

Nhan’s Varsity Lakes buy was from a mortgagee in August 2009.

The land had been owned by Belleraphon, a company linked to Victorian investors Salvatore Catalano and Ian Pattison, which is believed to have bought it for $8.8 million.

At the same time that Bondbao was enriching Nhan, an associate of the company, Baocai Wen, was spending $4.41 million on adjoining homes overlooking the golf course on the Royal Pines western precinct.