Prestige Waterfront, 10-storey project with 27 residential units & 600m2 commercial component

My First Crane! Completed in 2003, this 10-storey project was released with perfect timing at the start of a roaring market where prices doubled and doubled again in less than 5 years. 

If we could have replicated this project 10 times we would have and sold them all over the next few years. As it turned it became a touchstone for us and we subsequently completed 4 more projects in the same street with 100mts of this site, 4 of them being award winning prestige residential projects aimed at the high-end owner occupier. (See Platinum, m1 and Riva). 

The project was an amalgamation of 2 adjacent lots being a group of single level shops fronting Cornmeal Creek and an original riverfront home that had been converted during the 80’s into a restaurant with an office upstairs. 27 residential apartments in two towers above a common basement carpark. 

The view, across the Maroochy River to Pincushion Island and out to the Pacific was the absolute star of the show, helped by an emerging CBD location, floor to ceiling glass with retractable doors to invite the outside in, European appliances and the offer of customisation to each apartment made for a rush the release. 
The smaller 4 storey tower had absolute frontage to the Maroochy River with 1 per level 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom homes that we called, river terraces. The larger 10 storey (40 meter) tower was on the road frontage looking over the smaller one and a neighbour, including 12 x 3 bedroom, plus 8 x 2-bedroom units, 2 x 4-bedroom ‘Skyhomes’ that occupied half the floor plate on level 9 and 1 penthouse that occupied the entire 10th floor plus rooftop terrace. 

The competition and drama to purchase this unit (that we thought would be the hardest to sell based on its price) would prove to be the seed for future projects along the strip. The ground floor contained 600m2 of retail space that was leased in two almost equal halves to upper end restaurants (The Wine Bar & Hunt by the River). It planned to show the way for the new CBD sophistication. The site’s original approval was obtained by a local property investor/developer who was a client of mine in commercial consultancy and wanted to sell. 
Another client, a builder who I had put together several commercial projects for, purchased this also and while unplanned at the time, some 8 weeks later I joined them; building only to start a development division on the back of the increasing compliance in the industry through the introduction of the Integrated Planning Act (IPA). Hence, this was the first job of which I acted as Development Director plus my first crane. 

After selling out so quick, the market kept moving up and so did the cost of building materials along with our required knowledge to build a 10-storey building when the highest we had built before was 3! The learnings were as tall as our tower (and ambitions) and while on completion we didn’t meet our forecast profit, we did very well from the project in more ways than one.