Richest 250 - Lang Walker’s blank slate on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast
If it sounds too good and big to be true, unstoppable property developer Lang Walker knows it’s the project for him as he loves nothing more than proving the doubters wrong.
The List is the biggest annual study of Australia’s 250 wealthiest individuals, with final figures calculated in late February 2022. See the full list here.
Lang Walker likes a big challenge. There’s the $3.2 billion Parramatta Square development in Sydney’s west taking shape, a second Sydney CBD that is the biggest urban redevelopment in the country. Add that to a roll call of big projects such as the $2.5 billion Collins Square in Melbourne, a $3 billion project with the state government in Adelaide, and the building of 46,000 homes in southern Malaysia across the border from Singapore.
Walker’s past projects include the massive 22ha revamp at Sydney’s Rhodes peninsula, the city’s Woolloomooloo Wharf revamp, and even the $100 million luxury Kokomo resort in Fiji. But his latest mega project might be the one that excites him the most – a $2.5 billion rebuilding of the CBD at Maroochydore on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where the country’s biggest private property developer has a blank slate to work on. Yet he admits with a laugh that he once came unstuck with a previous tilt two decades ago at building one of his trademark big projects in the fast-growing Sunshine Coast centre.
“Well, if you’re a golfer, you know, golf club members often have a different opinion about things. And I tried to buy the course and relocate them. Some agreed, but yeah some of them were going to string me up and others didn’t like the course I was suggesting,” Walker tells The List. “So there we are, dealing with a bunch of golfers. It was not easy. So we ended up going off to do Hope Island instead.”
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This time around, Walker is having a better time of it on the Sunshine Coast. That Hope Island project went on to become a $1 billion development, including 2000 homes, a luxury marina, and a retail village amid canal fronts.
But it pales in comparison to what is coming at Maroochydore, where Walker Corporation has begun building the first stage of what will eventually see a greenfield site transformed into a CBD that will deliver about 160,000sq m of commercial and retail space and 4000 residential apartments over the next 15 to 20 years.
“It really is the only opportunity where you can plan an entire CBD on a blank sheet of paper,” Walker says. “It’s going to be a huge growth area in the next 20 years. You’ve got the Olympics coming here [in 2032], the rail coming in from Brisbane. To have one big 53ha parcel, it just opens up all sorts of opportunities for doing it properly if you’re starting from scratch.”
The site in part sits on the former Horton Park Golf Club that Walker remembers dealing with, and will include parklands and waterways. It will eventually be home to 20,000 people, and he has already begun building an upscale 15-storey office building to which he wants to attract blue-chip tenants, including ASX-listed companies.
Almost anyone can pull out a cheque book and buy some land but we like doing big and difficult things
There are also plans, which Walker Corporation is working on with the state government, to bring a rail line right into the new CBD area that will connect the region more quickly to Brisbane. The beach is nearby, and there are projections that an additional 200,000 residents will move to the Sunshine Coast within the next 20 years, where the airport is also being revamped. If it all sounds too big and good to be true, Walker says he is used to proving doubters wrong, even if with bigger projects comes the bigger risk of things going awry and the whole exercise proving costly.
“Well, I just love anything that’s difficult,” he says. “Almost anyone can pull out a cheque book and buy some land but we like doing big and difficult things.
“Rhodes peninsula was a terrific example. They used to make [the chemical] Agent Orange there and there was the ICI chemical factory there, and everybody thought I was nuts. Then you go back to look at the photos of what it was like when we got it and what it looks like now – it’s just amazing. But it’s about working through all the problems.
“I remember with Finger Wharf [at Woolloomooloo] there were five things to work through to make it successful. I managed to convince the government and council of those things and we worked through it. Our background is civil engineering, so anything that’s difficult we just love.”
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Walker started in business with his father Alec in 1964, specialising in earth moving and excavation. They would later move to building housing subdivisions, excavating and re-engineering the land themselves.
By 1972 Walker had established The Walker Group, shifting into building strata industrial and commercial properties, and then apartments and bigger housing subdivisions. He floated his business on the ASX in 1994, when he had $2 billion worth of projects under way. He would sell it to Australand and later get back into business under the original Walker name after a stint at McRoss Developments. Hope Island followed as well as a string of other projects, including the Broadway Shopping Centre in Sydney. In 2006 Walker sold $1.45 billion worth of assets to Mirvac, acquiring funds that would come in handy during the subsequent global financial crisis.
It also formed the basis of the big growth his business has experienced since, which in turn has stood it in good stead during Covid.
Walker Corporation has more than $32 billion of work in its pipeline at the moment, including the big projects in Malaysia and around Australia. “In Malaysia we’ve got three projects in total for 46,000 dwellings and it’s all based around the infrastructure that’s going in between Johor Bahru and Singapore,” Walker explains. “At Collins Square [in Melbourne] we’re launching plans for another two towers. With the heritage of the goods sheds we have there, we want to incorporate some more commercial space around them.
“On the land side of things, we’ve got 30,000 lots around the country under way ... and the master-planned community in Adelaide that has already sold 600 lots. It’s transforming a very boring landscape that was there. So yeah, it all sort of keeps me busy.”
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Walker has insisted his office remain operational and as full of employees as possible during the pandemic, arguing that the company works better when people are together and that too many other property companies have taken their eyes off the ball. He has a vested interest, given Walker Corporation is one of the biggest office project developers around, pushing ahead with Parramatta Square, which is meant to eventually house 30,000 workers and, he believes, save thousands the daily commute to Sydney’s CBD.
“I really think most things will get back to normal,” he says. “There might be a 15-20 per cent change in the way we do things, in terms of going to the office, but essentially I think everyone will go back and there will be a real push by big corporations and governments to have their people working closer to where they live.”
At 76, Walker admits he has “failed retirement” but he has no plans to take Walker Corporation public again or sell it off, preferring to keep it in the family (his three children have worked in the business) for the future.
“We’ve all our office assets earning money and we’re building up a large portfolio of income-producing properties. That’s on one side, and then we have our developments, where we have a lot of medium-density projects and a lot of master-planned communities.
“We just love a challenge. That is basically it. There are so many opportunities around.”