MAYD property Group: Inside story of planned $350m Kirra Beach hotel and residential development
A woman in her 80s who built a business around serum production is set to cash in on a $350m beachfront resort project planned for Kirra. FIND OUT HOW
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A WOMAN in her 80s who built a business around serum production and has played what could be called ‘the long game’ has a big card to play at Kirra.
Elizabeth Meixner is the majority owner of a swag of properties on which a $350 million beachfront hotel and apartment project is being mooted.
The investor, sometimes in tandem with an older sister, has been buying Kirra property since the early 90s and controls more than 5500 sqm.
The 81-year-old Elizabeth, the founder in Brisbane nearly 50 years ago of Moregate Biotech, could be poised to sell the bulk of her titles.
The Burleigh Heads-based Mayd group, founded by 32-year-old Todd Mould, has revealed plans for a $350 million project on 4792 sqm of Meixner land.
The price it is to pay for the land has not been revealed, but it’s paid a deposit and has lodged a development application.
The end game, should everything go according to the Mayd plan, will see the company deliver Kirra Beach -- two 10-level buildings, one of them a hotel.
The Hungarian-born Elizabeth founded Moregate in 1975, sourcing the needs for its serum, protein, plasma, and other animal by-products from abattoirs.
It has operations not only in Brisbane but also in the New Zealand city of Hamilton.
Moregate was bought out last year by New Zealand’s ANZCO Foods group, which supplies beef and lamb products and is Japanese owned.
Much of the Meixner buying at Kirra has been through company Cratburn, solely owned by Elizabeth.
Sister Helga Lithgo, who joined Moregate in 1990, has partnered Elizabth in some of the buying.
The Meixner-Lithgo holdings don’t match a giant amalgamation by Ariadne Australia in the 1980s and on which the listed group planned a project called Kirra by the Sea.
The Ariadne properties were sold off when the Bruce Judge-headed company hit the financial wall in what at the time was described as the biggest corporate collapse in Australian history.
Meanwhile, the Todd Mould plans for the Kirra Beach venture appear to be quite a step up for his Mayd entity.
Todd is involved in a tower project, outside Mayd.
He and Aaron Peel, together with a mystery American partner who has a half share in the venture, two years ago unveiled plans for a 17-level tower on a $13 million site overlooking the beach at 88 The Esplanade, Burleigh Heads.
The building was knocked back by the city council but subsequently approved last year on appeal to the Planning and Environment Court.
There is no sign of Nagambie, the four-floor building that occupies the land, being demolished.
The Mayd portfolio of building projects principally has involved luxury homes and apartment buildings of up to four floors, with a penchant shown for the Mermaid Beach area.
In 2020 it completed a Burleigh Heads commercial project, majority owned by a Broadbeach Waters resident, called Hornet Work Stores.
Plans for a family-friendly brewery on a Miami site owned by the Mould family were unveiled in 2020 and later approved by the city council.
There has been no attempt to clear the highway-front site, which is tenanted, but the project remains on the Mayd website.
MAYORAL MANOR
Tom Tate, a mayor with a penchant for moving home, has bought back into one of his favourite hunting grounds, Paradise Waters, in what is his 13th buy since the start of the new millennium.
Tom and wife Ruth have paid $4.25 million for a two-level property with four bedrooms and five bathrooms close to the Nerang River in Seafarer Court, a house that is equipped for cold times – it has a stone fireplace.
The purchase of the new mayoral manor comes in the wake of the Tates selling a resort-like property in Carrara’s Maryland Ave for $5.8 million – they bought it 18 months earlier for $3.825 million.
$8.7M SHACK
Jason Orthman, who helps the well-heeled get wealthier via his role in the top echelon of fund manager Hyperion, has decided the oceanfront in Mermaid Beach’s Multi-Millionaires’ Row is not a bad place in which to invest.
Jason and wife Susan have paid $8.7 million for what’s been described as a beach shack in Mermaid Ave, a three-bedroom home built more than 50 years ago.
The couple, who have stakes in an old-style home in a Mermaid side-street, have been chasing a tenant for their new buy, one willing to pay $1400 a week.
END OF AN ERA
TOSHIAKI Ogasawara, who developed the Emerald Lakes community at Carrara, left behind a British Virgins Islands connection when he died in the US seven years ago but it’s no more.
That association was via company Nerang Investment Holdings, which was set up 20 years ago as golf-loving Toshi was poised to make a $1 billion-plus investment in the Gold Coast.
It’s just been voluntarily wound up, ending another chapter in an era which included Toshi building his own private golf course, The Villa, on the riverfront at Nerang.
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