Australia’s Richest 250: Sydney’s best property deal revealed
One of the best property deals in Sydney’s southwest for decades started with a handshake over the bonnet of a ute.
Tony Perich is lamenting the fact he didn’t wear his “greens” or his terry towelling hat. The List is with him and Arnold Vitocco, his business partner in what has become one of the best property deals in Sydney’s southwest for decades: the Narellan Town Centre.
The story of Narellan is one of two local businessmen who raised $1 million and bought 5 acres of cow paddocks to start what is today a huge shopping centre with $600 million worth of annual sales. But it also encapsulates the huge potential and growth happening across the southwest of Sydney, a region where 500,000 people will soon live, with rail and vital transport links as well as Sydney’s second airport.
It is boom times in the southwest, where housing projects already stretch for miles and sleepy farming land is earmarked for even more developments. But it certainly wasn’t always that way.
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Perich, from the billionaire dairy and property family, recalls how at the age of 49 he came across his 24-year-old neighbour Vitocco, back in 1989, and Vitocco convinced him of his vision to transform a region that had been long ignored by government and the rest of Sydney.
It became a partnership sealed with a handshake over the bonnet of Perich’s ute on the side of what was then a country road, and The List has convinced the publicity-shy pair to talk about that deal and recreate its clinching for a photo.
Perich is the son of the late dairy farmer Kolombo Perich, who moved from Croatia in 1951 and started out with 25 cows. Today, Leppington Pastoral is on its way to milking 15,000 cows and Perich, now 79, has worked in the business all his life.
So it is no surprise to hear that back in 1989 he was dressed accordingly when he came upon Vitocco, a family friend and the son of late property developer Domenic, trying to build a fence on the semi-rural property he had just purchased.
“I had greens on, shorts and shirt, [work] boots and a terry towelling hat,” Perich explains. “I was farming! That’s how we dressed every day.” He laments that he had tried on the shorts the morning of our photo shoot, only to find they didn’t fit.
“I had bought a property up the road and I was out the front building a fence,” says Vitocco. He saw me doing that and pulled over to tell me I was building it wrong!”
“He didn’t have a clue what he was doing,” Perich interjects.
The pair got talking and discussed business, noting there was a five-acre parcel of land for sale nearby for about $1 million. It was well situated on a main road surrounded by housing and already had a few shops sitting on it, but Vitocco had a vision for a lot more, given Narellan was a region mostly without decent retail facilities and most people had to head “over the hill” to Campbelltown, or northeast towards the CBD, to shop.
“One thing led to another and all of a sudden I said ‘let’s do it’, and we [shook hands] over the bonnet of Tony’s ute. My father was away and his father was overseas at the time, and we said when they get back we can get their blessing.”
The duo would build the first three stages, Vitocco says, showing pictures of him and Perich onsite. They would pour the concrete, and put in the fittings and the piers, while Perich’s wife and Vitocco’s mother swept the floors.
Land next door would be bought from the ASX-listed Clutha Mining, which fortuitously had to sell quickly after a series of mine collapses meant it needed funds.
Other parcels were purchased over the years and $400 million in investment has now been spent on the town centre, which had annual turnover of $562 million last year and almost 11 million visits from shoppers.
Its size, which stretches one kilometre from side to side and all on the same grade, makes it the 56th largest shopping centre in the country and the 38th by turnover.
Crucially though, and at a time when many shopping centres around the world have been struggling, Narellan is ranked ninth for customer spend per square metre. In other words, shoppers spend more on average there than at almost any other centre in Australia and Vitocco says it is meeting a need that had not been met in the past – and employing 4500 locals in the process.
“This area was under-serviced for a long time,” he says. “It had 50,000 people here, the size of Bathurst, with not one decent shop. It was two supermarkets in [the region of] Camden for a long time and 15,000sq m of retail. That was it. You couldn’t buy bed sheets, shoes, kids clothing for school. There wasn’t a bank in Narellan. That’s only 15 years ago.”
The Narellan Town Centre with its 72,000 sq m of retail space has transformed the surrounding region. It is now undergoing immense change, with the huge Badgerys Creek Airport 10km to the north only six years away and 100,000 housing lots in the area planned or under way, plus apartments.
And while Perich and Vitocco have done well out of it, it is a deal that epitomises the boom time that Sydney’s west is experiencing, and the locals who have immense passion for and belief in the area. It’s a parochial place whose inhabitants have a clear identity that marks them out from Sydney’s east and north in particular, a region that is finally having its moment in the sun.
“All these developments happening around here helped Narellan happen, and these next ones are going to happen because of the Narellan,” says Perich. “The first developments helped the centre happen, now the centre is helping the next ones happen.”
The next ones Perich is referring to are huge, even if you’re just looking at a map of the area. Vitocco explains that already Narellan Town Centre has a primary and secondary catchment area of 130,000 people.
The area from Narellan up to the site of the Badgerys Creek Airport should fit at least 500,000 people. It could be more, depending on what the state government has earmarked for the large Aerotropolis site adjacent to the airport. Planning is not finalised, but it is likely to have a mix of medium- and high-density housing and commercial space that could even push the region’s population one day towards 1 million.
Perich and Vitocco themselves own large swathes of land where housing subdivisions are already present, planned or under way. The Perich family’s Oran Park will have 30,000 housing lots and apartments – the first of their type in the area – and other commercial, leisure and education facilities typical of a masterplanned community. Such is the scale of the project that Perich himself seems incredulous even mentioning the new 3000-pupil Oran Park High School, with its 2000-capacity auditorium, that has just been completed.
Vitocco Enterprises has 3000 lots at nearby Gregory Hills, 1500 at Emerald Hills, another 7000 dwellings planned at Lowes Creek between Narellan and the Airport and the 45ha Central Hills Business Park.
There’s also Stockland estates, and other locally or foreign owned communities, plus the Harrington Park project owned by the family of the late Lady Mary Fairfax.
All of this needs transport and Vitocco and Perich even funded a $64 million major road extension as part of the planning of some of their residential developments. An underground train station has been earmarked for land next to Narellan Town Centre, which would connect to the airport to the north and also act as a catalyst for apartment blocks to be built on land they already own.
The duo also sit on the board of the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research, a $50 million centre soon to grow to $150 million, says Perich, with 1000 researchers based in Campbelltown, Bankstown, Liverpool and nearby, studying and working on breakthroughs in clinical sciences, cancer research, injury and rehabilitation and mental health.
It is yet another facet of western Sydney’s transformation, which the two business partners saw coming 21 years ago.
“This is our backyard and we still live here,” says Vitocco, before Perich interjects once more.
“You have got to understand no one in their right mind would have thought all this would develop so fast and the population of Camden would have grown as quickly,” he says. “No one believed it.
“When we saw the growth in this area, I felt and Arnold felt we have brought a North Sydney type of building to Narellan. It is a very high-quality development in Narellan. And we have done that. It has worked.”
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