Retailer Gerry Harvey is co-developing a new $85m oceanfront development on Cottesloe beach
The billionaire is betting big on his private development foray into Perth's luxury Cottesloe beach.
Billionaire retailer Gerry Harvey is convinced that Perth’s famous Cottesloe beach is the west’s answer to Sydney’s Bondi and as such is developing an $85m apartment block on waterfront Marine Parade.
“If you live in Western Australia you want to live in Cottesloe. With this development it has become a very desirable place to live,’’ says Harvey, the chairman of Harvey Norman, who oversees about $9bn a year in retail sales.
“If you want to come to Sydney you live on Bondi Beach,’’ he says, adding that the beach “is not my go. I would rather live on five acres at Dural.”
Harvey has financed an entire luxury apartment block on a near-waterfront site fronting Cottesloe’s Marine Parade and Warnham Road. He is buoyed by the fact that Cottesloe’s beach area has been master-planned for redevelopment, including the car park.
“Perth used to be a country town – not any more. I compared Perth to Brisbane and they were both big country towns; now they are cities with good-quality buildings, with apartments and houses selling for 20 times more than they used to.
“Melbourne and Sydney were always there, and Adelaide is going the same way. I used to look at houses for $15,000 in Adelaide and now they are $800,000-$1m.’’ He says the quality of the architecture in Melbourne is so much better than in Sydney, and laments the fact that 30 years ago in Hobart you could buy a house for $15,000.
Harvey reckons that if his newly completed eight-unit apartment block in Cottesloe, known as The Warnham, which comes with a facade of handmade Spanish tiles, was in Sydney’s Bondi Beach, buyers would be looking at paying $30m-$40m each for the penthouses, while the building’s large three-bedroom apartments would be priced at about $17m. But prices are much lower in Perth.
All up, The Warnham has a $75m-$85m selling estimate for all eight apartments. The top two penthouses, which span up to 511sq m each, are priced at $25m apiece, while a three- bedroom apartment is on the market for $9.5m and a two bedder has a price of $3m.
A one-bedder has a $2m price tag and there have been buyers aplenty, with some apartments, which come with car parks and pricey Gaggenau appliances, already optioned or sold.
Some of the one and two-bedroom apartments have already sold.
“The top two apartments are where the money is,” Harvey says. “They have long balconies. I don’t think there will be any difficulty selling the two penthouses … I think this is an iconic building, one of those ones you will look at and wish you could live there.”
He is being besieged by restaurateurs wanting to take the unit block’s ground-floor commercial space and says he will only consider high-end restaurants, as befits the quality of the apartment block. “That’s as good a site as you would get anywhere in Perth.”
The restaurants will start out renting, but Harvey and his partner could sell them the space down the track.
“At the end of the day the restaurants might want to buy; we would talk to them.”
The apartments are being marketed by Chris Shellabear of Shellabears, based in Cottesloe beach. Shellabear says buyers to date are all owner-occupiers.
“When people realise the foreshore redevelopment plan will see the entire car park greened for the future, that will make a big difference.” he says.
“If you wanted a Sydney example [of this type of apartment complex] it’s probably more Bronte than Bondi, because it’s a smaller scale; if you could be on the waterfront at Bronte that is the Sydney equivalent.” Shellabear says that when he first sold the site in 2004 he had a couple of interested bidders from Sydney.
Space Realty agent Justin Davies is also handling the penthouse marketing campaign.
Meanwhile, Harvey is also developing in the NSW country town of Dubbo, where he proposes a 15-level apartment block in the main street and overlooking the river.
“There is very strong demand,” he says, but points out that the difficulty of developing in a country town was finding a local builder capable of building 80 residential units.
“I would like to do this in another country town but I can’t make it [financially] stack up,” he explains.
This story is from the August issue of Mansion magazine.
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