Gold Coast development: 100-storey Park Lane towers in Southport facing challenges
The ambitious developers who have rolled out plans for $400m linked 100 and 60-floor towers in the heart of Southport are facing some big challenges to getting their project approved.
Property
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The ambitious group that’s rolled out plans for linked 100 and 60-floor towers in Southport has hit some planning potholes and is far from bowling full steam ahead with the venture.
It’s nine months since the Melbourne partners in the project embarked on securing a green light.
A week or so after they lodged their planning application they were told it was incorrectly submitted.
Move ahead to June and it remains incorrectly lodged, despite Gold Coast City Council granting the developers four extensions to get it right.
The latest extension runs out next month – a month after the council initially said it would give the tower proponents a yes or no.
There’s also a slight problem with a partial road closure – the council won’t back the closure but the Department of Resources has the final say.
The ‘tall storeys’ venture is earmarked for land overlooking the greens of the Southport Bowling Club.
The bigger tower is to house apartments and its smaller neighbour offices and the buildings will be linked by a skybridge at level 22.
The project is intended for a 1245sq m site at the eastern end of Park Lane, a dead-end address off Scarborough St.
The Park Lane project involves Tony Goss, a British-born fellow from Melbourne who at one time copped the wrath of the corporate watchdog over his association with failed companies.
A Goss company owns one of the two properties that make up the tower site, with a contract held over the other one, owned by Con Simondis.
The consortium behind the tower plan includes Melbourne funds manager the Payton Group.
The council, in declaring the development application incorrectly lodged, spelled out a raft of problems with it.
One was that the number of apartments planned showed as both 193 and 198.
Another was that it was intended to reconfigure a lot but no plans to do that were included in the application.
There also was the question of providing correct forms giving the consent of the landowners to the use of their properties for the towers.
Meanwhile, the development team has faced other hurdles, a major one being parking.
The site, by virtue of its not-so generous size, has required some solutions when it comes to providing parking for the residents in 193 apartments and the tenants in 11,540sq m of office space.
The team behind the project, and its consultants, have come up with a couple of answers.
One is to seek the closure of part of Park Lane that provides access to the tower site – which council objects to.
The developers also want to gain volumetric title to the area under that portion of the road.
Then the ‘deep’ thinking comes in.
Parking will be required for more than 400 vehicles and the solution nutted out is a 12-level basement.
The vehicles will be ‘parked’ using a whiz-bang German car-stacker system – or, more correctly, two such systems.
There’ll be one for the apartments and, on the opposite side of the basements, one for the offices.
Each stacker will have two lift pads and, all up, the system is expected to be capable of moving 120 vehicles, either up or down, an hour.
Visitors won’t have to grapple with the system – their parking will be on basement’s first level.
Meanwhile, bicycle owners in the planned Park Lane towers won’t have the use of a bike stacker – it appears they’ll have to pedal down to basement two – or go by lift – where there’ll be accommodation for 220 two-wheelers.
SIRROMET INTO BEER
Terry Morris, Sirromet wines founder, is putting on his pub hat to operate a tavern and bottle shop at the Queen Street Village development on the ex-Gold Coast Hospital site.
His ‘beer’ arm has leased the Southport village’s already-built tavern building, is fitting it out, and hopes to open for business within six to eight weeks.
Meanwhile, the Morris group has sold pub businesses in Dalby and Toowoomba, believing such properties are easier to run when they’re closer to home.
MUSCLING IN ON PROPERTY
Rob Deutsch, one of the men who founded the F45 fitness group, appears to have been just warming up his spending muscles last year when he splashed $19 million on an oceanfront Mermaid Beach pad.
He and his model wife, Nicole Perso, earlier this year outlaid $37.5 million on a mansion in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill and this month have added a $25.5 million apartment in the city’s One Barangaroo tower.
Rob and Nicole, who married last year, apparently haven’t needed mortgages for either property.
DRIVING UP THE EMPIRE
Wade Von Bibra, these days running the car empire assembled by dad Warren, has engaged in a spot of commercial property buying.
A company of which he is sole director has spent $4.2 million on a warehouse in Southport’s Expo Crt, where the Von Birba group already has a major presence.
The group’s stake includes the sites of Nissan and Honda outlets and the latest buy, on the opposite side of the street, takes the Von Bibra land holdings to more than 1.5ha.
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