Apartment king Harry Triguboff embarks on his biggest development spree in years

Meriton supremo Harry Triguboff has been spurred into action by the RBA’s interest rate cut and an improved approvals process to begin one of his biggest building sprees in many years.

Billionaire developer Harry Triguboff is selling the Gold Coast penthouse he's owned for 34 years.

Billionaire developer Harry Triguboff has embarked on an apartment development spree provoked by the recent interest rate cut coupled with a series of government planning approvals.

Mr Triguboff, 92, the founder of Meriton Apartments and the nation’s largest private developer of units and owner of hotels, said residential sales have been improving for the past five weeks – particularly in Sydney’s suburbs – encouraging him to start one of his biggest apartment development sprees in years.

Thanks to improved market sentiment on the eastern seaboard he has started to build a $1.5bn 1000-unit tower on Brisbane’s Alice St.

In Sydney he is embarking on 300 units in Epping, a further 1000 units in Carlingford, as well as 1500 units in Pagewood where he has been putting the finishing touches to 5000 units for the past few years.

“I am much more confident now because the purchasers are arriving in bigger numbers,” Mr Triguboff said. He said he was considering lodging fresh plans for a development at Sydney’s Little Bay in the eastern suburbs.

“Sydney is doing better than the Gold Coast in terms of apartment sales. But everywhere units that do well are the units that are not too expensive; the units that are a little bit above average do well,” he said.

Mr Triguboff said it was easier to sell apartments in the $1.1m range but apartments priced higher were more difficult to offload.

As an example, he is yet to negotiate a sale for his two-level penthouse in the Silverpoint tower at Main Beach, which he bought new on the Gold Coast in 1990 and listed for sale last November.

Meriton’s Pagewood development in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

“Also there’s a much better feeling in the market, that’s very important,” Mr Triguboff said. “They are approving more apartments now.”

He said the February 18 cut by the RBA to the official interest rate – the first in nearly five years which dropped the cash rate from 4.35 per cent to 4.1 per cent – had given him the confidence to build.

Mr Triguboff said the attitude of planning authorities had also changed, as previously he could not get approvals to commence apartment towers.

“I couldn’t get approvals that is why they have all come at once. You like to spread the construction out, but I couldn’t get the approvals,” he said.

Asked if he had sufficient construction staff to build the apartment towers in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney, Mr Triguboff said he did because he always paid contractors “top rates”.

He said rents were increasing but it was more difficult to sell smaller apartments than larger ones.

“The smaller units are difficult to sell because people buy larger, older apartments; we are not building smaller ones now. We used to build a lot of one bedrooms or one bedrooms plus multipurpose rooms, now we are not building them,” he said.

Originally published as Apartment king Harry Triguboff embarks on his biggest development spree in years