On the QT: Reedy Creek’s Will the Wrecker set to try his hand at property development

REMEMBER Will the Wrecker? After clearing out much of his famous car wrecking yard next to the M1, he’s now turned his attention to a different venture — development.

Will the Wrecker.

WILL the Wrecker, his car-parts empire suffering from government-induced shrinkage, appears set to become Will the Builder.

Property sources say 81-year-old Will Smith is preparing to turn developer on two sites that sit in his valuable property portfolio.

Will’s projects, apparently worth millions of dollars, involve a holding overlooking the beach at Miami and acreage at Bonogin.

His new career-path also will take in Rockhampton, in the form of redevelopment of a truck stop he’s owned for nearly a decade.

Will the wrecker at his Reedy Creek yard.

An associate who is privy to Will’s property plans describes him as ‘the original hoarder’.

Will, in a car-parts career that has spanned nearly 50 years, made his name by storing some 5000 vehicles on a highway-front site at Reedy Creek and selling car-parts to customers around Australasia.

Last year he sold the bulk of the wrecking yard to the State Government for $9.1 million, land that will be used for a bus-transfer station for the Commonwealth Games.

Property that the State government purchased for the Comm Games. Picture Mike Batterham

Will still operates his business from the front 4000sq m of the site, which is graced by a pink Holden FX nestling on the first-floor balcony of a ramshackle house.

He’s kept 600,000 parts and stored them on a Burleigh Heads site bought when the government deal was cemented.

Property records show that Will has ‘hoarded’ 10 properties since arriving on the Gold Coast from Victoria in 1958.

The old car yard Picture Mike Batterham

He also owns one in NSW — a service station at the historic village of Uki in northern NSW.

It appears first cab off the rank in Will’s Gold Coast development pipeline will be a 407sq m site on the corner of Kelly Ave and Brakes Cres at Miami that he’s owned since 1996.

A rundown Mexican hacienda-style duplex that’s sat empty since 2000 looks set to be razed to make way for a new duplex where the apartments are predicted to be $4 million beauties.

Will, a former Surfers Paradise AFL ruckman, has a soft spot for Miami — at the end of the 50s he opened a service station (sold in 1970) on a site that today houses a Shell servo and a KFC outlet.

Will Smith, with one of his cars.

Project No. 2 for the new-age developer reportedly will be a lifestyle estate on 3ha Bonogin Rd property picked up for a tad over $1 million early last year.

Will’s ‘Rocky’ project centres around a truck stop bought sight unseen in 2008 for $2.2 million.

The truck stop operator, Caltex, appears to have instigated a move to redevelop the property into a bigger and better set up and will tip in $3 million, with Will contributing $2 million.

The upside for Will the Builder comes in the form a new 30-year Caltex lease, starting at $500,000 a year.

That lease could ‘pump up’ the value of the truck stop to more than $11 million — the equivalent of truckloads of car parts.