Buyers scarce so Harry Triguboff looks for tenants

Multi-billionaire developer Harry Triguboff tips hundreds of units and thousands of serviced apartments into NSW and Queensland rental pool.

Multi-billionaire developer Harry Triguboff tips hundreds of units and thousands of serviced apartments into NSW and Queensland rental pool. Picture: John Appleyard

Multi-billionaire developer Harry Triguboff has been faced with no choice but to tip hundreds of units and thousands of serviced apartments into the NSW and Queensland rental pool in a rising trend.

The founder of Meriton Apartments said he had no choice because at the moment he could not sell them given his usual buyers — students and migrants — had disappeared.

“We have no people coming … we don’t have people to buy,” he said.

He is calling on state and federal governments to lift domestic and international border restrictions and get the economy moving again.

“We have a big demand for leasing, I lease 200 apartments a week, (because) those people don’t have the money to buy,” he said.

On Tuesday this week, Mr Triguboff put another 300 new units on the leasing market, saying the global phenomenon of developers building to rent should stop for now as there are too many new apartments in Australian cities that can’t find buyers.

The 300 units he has put on the market are in Sydney’s Chatswood, Mascot, Zetland, Kent St, Arthur St, North Sydney and Grafton St in Bondi Junction. In Queensland he is renting out units because he can’t sell them at Herschel St in Brisbane, as well as at his Pegasus development on the Gold Coast.

He said the apartments would attract good rentals of between $500 and $800 a week.

But it is not only residential apartments that Mr Triguboff is renting out. He is finding it tough to secure holiday makers and corporate travellers to book his 20 serviced apartment complexes on the eastern seaboard.

“That is even worse, a lot of my business is in serviced apartments, people are not around they rent them for lunches and gatherings.”

He is renting out 1000 serviced apartments in the Sydney suburbs of Parramatta, Pagewood, Rosebery and Homebush.

“We don’t have tourists and we don’t have businesses working, serviced apartments require business to work,” he said.

“It will all change, it will be OK, but at the moment I have to rent these properties out,” he said.

Mr Triguboff said the build to rent phenomenon — which refers to a residential development in which all apartments are owned by the developer, often a managed investment trust, and leased out to tenants — could not work at the moment.

“We need the economy to get back to where it was. Of course we need housing but there are not enough people who can pay for it,” he said.

He said any developer running after the government with a build to rent scheme was desperate.

“We just have to let things settle down, we have to know when the students, tourists, workers and migrants are coming back. The government has to tell us when they will come back,” he said, adding that if he started building an apartment complex he couldn’t stop it half way.

He is also advocating a change to the constitution, which he says has given state governments too much power to keep borders closed.

“They wrote the constitution 200 years ago, they didn’t understand this could happen,” he said. Build to rent differs from the common build to sell method, where a developer builds a residential development and sells the apartments to individual buyers to either live in or rent out as an investment.

Build to rent is part of a growing institutionalised housing market and is particularly attractive for institutions that want reliable, steady income.

UniLodge and Aware Super have said they are interested in the build to rent market.