Australia’s Richest 250: Maha Sinnathamby and Bob Sharpless build the dream

Build a thriving $88 billion city on the fringe of Brisbane? It seemed like madness, but with remarkable tenacity these two business partners have pulled it off.

Maha Sinnathamby and Bob Sharpless. Picture: Russell Shakespeare.

Maha Sinnathamby’s laugh is infectious. Especially when he is asked if he was mad for thinking he could make a success of carving out almost 3000ha of forest on the fringe of Brisbane to build an $88 billion city from scratch.

It’s a place where 43,000 people, with an average age of 29, now live. There are 11 schools operating, a large open-air shopping centre with a free water park next door where children splash around in the morning sun, and a large public park nearby where 5000 gathered for Christmas Carols a few months ago.

There’s a university campus too, as well as a hospital, hotels, pubs and clubs, beautiful sports facilities, a highway to Brisbane, and two large train stations connecting commuters to the city. It is the sort of place where a friendly hotel manager will give you a lift to the city’s headquarters for your interview with the two blokes behind it because it is a nice thing to do.

If Greater Springfield sounds too good to be true, it is because it almost is. Drive around the six suburbs and you’ll see modern Australia, but with a twist. There are the mansions dominating their blocks that appear across suburbia anywhere, yet there are manicured lakes and well-kept fringes and playgrounds, walking areas and shops. It just looks nice. Almost incongruous. 

And a little larger than Sinnathamby first imagined when looking at the land with his long-time business partner Bob Sharpless almost three decades ago, having somehow convinced some timber merchants to lend him most of the nearly $8 million purchase price for 7000 acres of land. Almost half of it will be developed and the rest left as green space.

“When we first started it was just Bob and me, and we had a $5 million debt to the vendor,” Sinnathamby says. “We managed to get $3 million from someone else; that was non-refundable. Bob and I worked out if we sold about 5000 blocks [of land for housing] we would pay off the $5 million and would have the balance of the land free – something like 6500 acres. So I said, what’s wrong with that?” Sinnathamby roars with laughter.

It hasn’t been that easy. They have come close to collapsing, spent years trying to convince politicians of the project’s merits and survived a global financial crisis, but they managed to come through it all. Sinnathamby still beams at the memory of celebrating Springfield’s 25th anniversary in 2017, when then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull labelled it “a nation-building project and a project of national significance”.

Sinnathamby is a billionaire on The List, with his 75 per cent stake in the Springfield Land Corporation and estimated wealth of $1.67 billion, while Sharpless’s 25 per cent stake means he is worth an estimated $564 million. No wonder he’s laughing. 

But it’s not the chortle of a madman who has pulled off some sort of heist and made off like a bandit with billions of dollars. It’s the enthusiastic and joyful giggle of someone who, yes, got called “mad” for years, once had a state premier joke – we think – that he should be locked up for stalking, and has gone on to build something that is equal parts unique and audacious. But underestimate Maha Sinnathamby at your peril, because he has been written off before.

He’s also failed before too, only to recover. Malaysian-born, he emigrated to Perth in late 1971 after previously earning an engineering degree in Sydney. He became a property developer after a stint selling real estate, and his Murdoch Constructions grew quickly in the late 1970s. But he had taken on too much debt, and after one large investor pulled funding, Murdoch collapsed in 1983 owing $28 million.  

By then, Sharpless, an aspiring young developer, had started working for Sinnathamby after writing him a letter asking to be taken on in the hope he would learn the property game from someone who had started to make his mark around Perth. The collapse didn’t deter Sharpless, and after Sinnathamby had negotiated a deal with his creditors, the duo moved to Queensland. They went about repairing their reputation, developing hotels in Brisbane and Cairnss and surviving another ill-fated attempt by Sinnathamby to go public.

Aerial view of Springfield.

Then the Springfield opportunity came along. Sharpless wasn’t exactly overwhelmed at its prospects to begin with, even if it was 2860 acres, given he had been used to projects that it took 10 minutes to walk around.

“This was a timber operation for about 52 years and they harvested the timber for wood chips,” he says. “This parcel lay vacant for a long time – they couldn’t sell it. The local or big developers passed over it.”

Sinnathamby laughs again when he recalls that “about 10 minutes from this land was a state prison and it was the only asset around that was growing fast. And the only thing next to it was a mental asylum.”

But a deal was done, and the sheer size of the land provided a blank canvas for Sinnathamby and Sharpless, who embarked on a world tour in an attempt to learn from previously built master-planned communities.

“We went to 15 communities – 13 in the US and 2 in the UK,” remembers Sinnathamby. “We got a lot of notes from it. But one thing that came out was that each of the 15 had one major item missing. It wouldn’t have a train line, or one didn’t have a major highway. Another didn’t have a major university, one was missing a big shopping centre and definitely most of them didn’t have a big hospital, which we wanted.

“So when we came back, we thought the best thing was to put everything in ours, all in the one spot. A person who lives here can have an invisible fence around them and they don’t need to go somewhere else for anything, except if they wanted to go to the opera – and maybe we will do something about that one day!”

It was still a hard slog after they came up with their original plans though. It took them three years to convince then state premier Wayne Goss to fund the vital extension of the Century Highway to Springfield to give it a proper link to Brisbane, and later a special Act of Parliament was passed after years of lobbying to give Springfield Development Corporation planning and development powers.

Sinnathamby still remembers being jokingly called a “stalker” by ex-premier Peter Beattie; the file marked “do not build the highway for this man” advisers handed to Goss; and another premier, Anna Bligh, backing a train line because she considered Sinnathamby “a community developer rather than just a property developer”.

Sharpless recalls the banks closing in because they didn’t like the sheer volume of land being held without income being generated by quick property sales; a 1999 deal with Delfin for a large subdivision that gave them breathing room; and surviving the global financial crisis.

“We have been through the struggle of it,” he says. “In the quiet moments, only we and our wives probably know the challenges we got through to get where we are now.”

Almost three decades after they began, Sinnathamby and Sharpless are only halfway through their masterpiece, and believe they can engineer a modern society that is well educated and highly skilled, and attractive to big business and government while serving as a model of what can be achieved when both cooperate. It has everything the pair wanted to put into the project, but there is a whole lot more to come.

“A lot of people say ‘you must be happy with what has happened’. I say, ‘well you haven’t seen anything yet’,” Sinnathamby says with that trademark laugh.

While he and Sharpless are 30 years into their project, they believe it has another 30 years to go. There are still 23,000 apartments to be built under their masterplan, about 2.6m square metres of commercial space and another 8000 traditional housing lots. Fifteen more schools are also in the pipeline, as well as upgraded university and higher education facilities, and the health precinct – which already includes a 1200-bed Mater Hospital and Aveo aged care facilities – extends over 52ha. In comparison, Barangaroo in Sydney is built over about 22ha.

Sinnathamby and Sharpless are only halfway through their masterpiece, and believe they can engineer a modern society that is well educated and highly skilled, and attractive to big business and government while serving as a model of what can be achieved when both co-operate.

The duo are therefore excited about the future, but for the first time have decided to bring in some outside help to get the project completed. They have hired investment bank Moelis to conduct an international search for a development partner to turbocharge the next stages, mostly concentrating on the commercial precincts in healthcare and technology in what Sinnathamby calls “Ideas City”.

While they have partnered with developers before on certain aspects of the project, including with Mirvac on the award-winning Orion shopping centre, this is the first time they’ve wanted a larger joint venture partner to bring what Sharpless calls “additional horsepower”. He rejects the idea that the search means the duo don’t have enough horsepower of their own to complete the job.

“No, I think it is just recognition that we are still a small private company doing a very large project,” he says. “We’ve done all the hard stuff though ... so really we are looking for someone we can work with shoulder to shoulder in the interest of the entire project.”

The remaining phases are built on Sinnathamby’s three pillars: health, education and IT. All are designed to work in harmony to create local jobs for local people, with the pair determined to bring big international technology firms to Springfield, as well as the best in health institutions and education faculties – to give it a point of differentiation. 

“Usually the objective is come in to make some money and then disappear,” Sinnathamby says of property developers. “It is what Bob calls parasitic development, where you buy a piece of land that has all the major infrastructure around it, you exploit it and then you disappear. But here we have built everything from scratch and what we are doing here is influencing a region.” 

Sharpless says the point of building to a higher standard and having top-notch schools and education facilities is to give big companies a ready-made skilled and educated workforce to tap into when they move to Springfield.  

“You have to remember that we are trying to create 50,000 jobs here – one job for every three people [eventually] living here. We have to identify those themes that will drive employment, that will need our facilities and real estate, and we will build the buildings and house the workforce. We have laid the platform, but there are still large parts that we are looking for a catalyst for to theme that part of the project. Our eyes are open, and we are looking for things that may be a point of differentiation.”

With that, Sinnathamby returns to the theme of Springfield’s uniqueness. “Take this 43,000 here and compare it to 43,000 outside Perth, or outside Adelaide and Sydney. This is a highly educated community,” he says, thumping the table.

He ends with another laugh – and a challenge. See if there is another Springfield development out there, he says, while wishing anyone good luck in their quest. Where else, he points out, will you get this amount of land and get all the necessary government approvals, transport links and the like. “You have to get the approvals!” He chuckles loudly at the sheer unlikelihood. Someone might tell you they could do something similar, he says, but there’s no way they are telling the truth.

“You have to draw your own conclusions, but believe me when I tell you there is nothing out there like this. Where else can you get this amount of land? You can’t!

“If you find it, let me know. But they will be bluffing you. There is nothing like this.”