Property: Adam Scott’s long-running plans to develop Rockhampton site closer to fruition

Champion golfer and Sanctuary Cove favourite son Adam Scott has long wanted to develop a major piece of land. Now it looks like he’s finally getting his shot.

ADAM Scott, champion golfer and Sanctuary Cove’s favourite son, could be close to seeing some daylight at the end of what has been a ‘Rocky road’.

The resort’s touring professional and intermittent resident did a spot of touring with his winnings in the earlier years of the new millennium.

Some was spent on the Gold Coast but the biggest Scott ‘play’ to emerge was in the river city that is Rockhampton.

Back in 2007 Adam, via company Balboa Developments (Qld), was in a deal to buy an approved development site for $15 million.

The 7502sq m parcel, which has a river frontage, had changed hands for $3.85 million the previous year.

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Adam Scott. Picture: Tom Pennington

It appears the seller subsequently gained a development approval for a project that included 200 apartments, a restaurant and a convention centre.

The GFC started to unfurl a year after the Balboa purchase and any thoughts of building the apartments were put on the backburner.

Eventually the Rocky council granted an extension to the development approval but that expired two years ago.

The Scott camp is believed to have had various balls up in the air to determine what might work on the Balboa land.

The land carries a high-density residential zoning, one that opens the door to options such as a vertical retirement village and short-term accommodation.

The former TSS student, who has homes in the Bahamas and Switzerland and is enjoying a highly profitable year on the golf circuit, clearly is no developer so bringing in a joint-venture partner with project skills is an obvious option.

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Adam Scott in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Tom Pennington)

A Rockhampton real estate guru believes the city’s apartment market is “bubbling” and the time might be fast approaching when development of the land could be viable.

That view is based on a revival of the mining industry’s fortunes, the approval of the Adani mine, strong cattle prices, enormous spending on the city’s infrastructure, and a tight rental market.

Rocky is a major service centre for coal mines in the Bowen, Galilee and Surat basins and its residential vacancy rate is running at an historically low one to two per cent.

This already is stoking the approval and development of riverfront apartment projects.

Balboa Developments, of which Adam’s dad Philip is sole director, is based at Sanctuary Cove and its ownership traces through to a company listed in Jersey in the Channel Islands, where the trail runs cold.

Adam, 2013 US Masters champion and one-time world No. 1 golfer, is no stranger to property investment on the Gold Coast.

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Swede and wife of masters champion Marie Kojzar

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The sweet swinger, who married Swedish architect Marie Kojzar in 2014 and today is a father of two, targeted beachfront Surfers Paradise apartment building Jade in 2004.

He signed up, off the plan, for two new $4.4 million apartments, flicking one of them three years later for $5.9 million.

His luck ran out with the second one – again the GFC intervened.

The apartment was marketed at $4.95 million in January 2010, then at $3.65 million a year later, and subsequently at $2.9 million.

Ultimately Adam, who earned $A8.8 million on the US tour in the 2018-19 season, unloaded it for $1.94 million.

He might have received some consolation over his loss from the fact that the buyer who paid him $5.9 million for his other Jade apartment in 2007 sold out during the GFC for $3 million.

OTHER BUSINESS NEWS

Clive Palmer. Photo: Iain Curry / Sunshine Coast Daily

* CLIVE Palmer, collector of luxury homes, appears to have headed west in his latest foray into the elite end of the market.

The billionaire has been identified as the buyer of a $4.6 million mansion in the affluent Perth suburb of Applecross – a home once listed at close to $8 million.

Clive already has a $9.5 million abode on the Sovereign Islands, a $12 million beach-house at Mermaid Beach, and a $7.4 million riverfront Brisbane home.

* TRENERT, the Brisbane group planning classy Main Beach tower White, had a keen eye on another high-rise site before the property was snaffled last month by the Raptis camp.

The holding, on the ‘dry’ side of Main Beach Pde, is approved for a 22-floor tower with 38 apartments but Trenert apparently was mooting a reconfigured design.

Its White tower, in Woodroffe Ave, is to have 27 single-floor apartments, starting at $2.2 million, and a multi-level penthouse.

* BRUCE GRADY, a Gold Coast property player who took US petrochemicals group Huntsman Corporation to court over alleged lease breaches, has a $4 million buyer for part of the Coopers Plains industrial property that was the subject of the legal ruckus.

He’s apparently working on a $25 million plan to build on the balance of the site, possibly with a partner.

Bruce, who paid $3.8 million for the property in 2002, and Huntsman settled their fight via mediation in May.