Hedges Ave: Mermaid Beach properties on millionaire’s row see massive value spike

The multi-millionaires who live on the beachfront at Mermaid Beach have been on a merry old romp to more wealth. Here’s how much they’ve seen their values rise. FULL STORY

THE multi-millionaires who live on the beachfront at Mermaid Beach have been on a merry old romp to more wealth.

The winners also include billionaires such as developer Bob Ell, pubs-and-pokies player Bruce Mathieson, and Shopkins toy producer Manny Stul.

The values for properties fronting the sand in Hedges and Albatross avenues have ridden a demand wave and, as 2022 ended, there was no sign of the swell times petering out.

New players and new money have descended on the so-called golden strip and helped prices for homes, land, and apartments race to record levels.

Slice of Mermaid beachfront

A prime example is a pre-Christmas deal on an 810 sqm Hedges Ave site at $19.2 million, pumping up the potential value of a single 405 sqm lot in the street to $9.6 million.

That sale, involving land with a 15-metre height limit, set a Gold Coast record of $23,703 a square metre for beachfront land.

That figures top anything a developer has paid for a high-rise site fronting the sand at Main Beach or Surfers Paradise.

Little more than 18 months earlier a bigger site in Hedges Ave, one of 900 sqm, had sold for just $11 million.

That deal came out at a mere $12,222 a square metre.

For the owners of ‘normal’ 405 sqm lots in Hedges Ave, and who like to sit back and watch their beachfront investment prosper, their chunk of dirt has, based on the $23,703 a square metre rate, close to doubled in value in little more than two years.

Slice of Mermaid beachfront

That’s when $4.8 million was paid for a dilapidated beach shack at 65 Hedges Avenue.

At the end of the GFC era a 405 sqm property changed hands for $3.05 million.

Among the winners, on paper, from the land-price surge are ‘old- money’ owners Mick Power, Brisbane construction industry veteran, and wife Denise.

They set a Mermaid Beach all-time beachfront high of $19,135 a square metre for 810 sqm in Hedges Ave 18 months ago – a rate that since has been surpassed by more than $4500 per square metre.

Meanwhile, the leap in land values has helped put a rocket under house values.

Dean Pask, son of billionaire developer the late Nev Pask, paid $25 million in 2020 for the home fronting the beach of BreakFree holiday-group founder Tony Smith and former wife Simone.

Mick Power

The deep site upon which the house sits, 2112 sqm, today at $20,000 a square metre, could be worth $42 million or more.

Chris Morris, who bought a Hedges Ave home for $15.75 million in 2020, sold it 15 months later for $21 million to fresh face Lindsay Smith, son of PFD Food Services founder and former owner Richard Smith.

Another newcomer is Rob Deutsch, a founder of the F45 fitness group, who in November paid $19 million for a home on 556 sqm at 1 Heron Avenue.

A couple who already were Mermaid Beach residents also have headed to the beach after paying Harvey Norman executive Steve Cavalier $21.75 million for his Hedges Ave pad.

Ross Jurisich, who with two partners sold the Byron Bay brewer Stone & Wood for a reported $500 million, and wife Megan have since embarked on a $3.5 million ‘refurb’.

Leda Holdings executive chairman Bob Ell. Picture: LinkedIn

The daddy of them all among beach newcomers, and possessors of ‘new’ money, has been Andrew Fahey, a founder of online gambling group PointsBet.

He and partner Katrina Luland bought the 900 square metre Abedian land for $17.5 million on the corner of Ocean Street and then doubled down in money terms by adding the 900 square metre land next door on which the Pathenon apartment block sits.

They are in the process of reconfiguring the combined parcel to give them a larger site for a family home.

While that process is underway, they have sold, but not settled, the $19.2 million sale of the 810 sqm balance of their holding to give them a 993 square metre corner site for their new home.

Meanwhile, some market sceptics could argue beachfront prices might well go south again at some stage, as they did dramatically during the GFC.

The opposite view could be that new interest from ‘down south’, inspired by the Covid pandemic, in tandem with a growing dearth of available properties, will at least underpin the market and at the very worst there will be a slowdown in transactions instead of a reduction in values.

Originally published as Hedges Ave: Mermaid Beach properties on millionaire’s row see massive value spike