A developer will test the Gold Coast market’s appetite for a new style of townhouse living close to the beach, with plans to roll the product out across other beachside locales.
Burgeoning Gold Coast developer Luke Vaughan has teamed with Australian construction executive Geoff Pontefract, who has more than 30 years’ experience in highrise development, and Sri Lankan investor Buddika Kulasekara to develop seven four-storey townhouses on a Palm Beach site.
The trio has lodged plans for the development, to be called Jasmine on 24th, with the Gold Coast City Council. It is on just 810sq m across 9 and 11 Twenty Fourth Avenue at Palm Beach, through a put and call option.
“We know we are pioneering something new on the coast,” Vaughan says.
“It might be a foreign concept to us on the Gold Coast but it is more common in higher density areas in New South Wales and Victoria.
“We wanted to create a level of luxury that was missing in the Palm Beach area. It has proximity to the beach and Burleigh and that unique Palm Beach lifestyle as a drawcard … there has been a real gentrification of the area.
“The four-storey townhouses are innovative and something new on the Gold Coast, they will have individual lifts, three to four bedrooms and breakout spaces. We wanted them to have enough bedrooms so one of the rooms could be an adaptable office space if needed.”
Each townhouse has a lift, a courtyard, balconies on levels 1 and 4, up to four bedrooms and two tandem carparking spaces.
Vaughan says the Palm Beach site will be a proof of concept, which they are looking to replicate across potential sites at Broadbeach and Mermaid.
Vaughan says the trio has been working on the finer details of the project for about three months with the help of Jordan Pope from Impact Design.
“When you take the time to develop something that is aesthetically beautiful, it gets noticed,” he says.
“We wanted to come up with something that was unique.”
The project is a staid and considered approach to the site, which could have accommodated a building to 29m high.
But Vaughan says it addresses a gap in the market at Palm Beach and more broadly across the coast. It also enables the developer to get the project off the ground sooner, as opposed to a two to three-year building program if they developed a tower.
Vaughan says the property will most likely attract downsizers or families looking for beach lifestyle from the southern states. He says they haven’t set a price point for the product yet but he says they want to breach $2 million, catering to buyers looking for bigger properties on the coast.
“We are super confident in the market on the Gold Coast. At the end of the day there’s always going to be projects that don’t make it out of the ground, but I think construction prices are going to ease in the next six to 12 months,” he says.
▲ Vaun Developments has sold out its Meyer Residences development at Southport ahead of completion.
Vaughan also has a townhouse development at Southport, Meyer Residences, which has just sold out ahead of completion.
It’s the third time Vaughan has teamed with Pontefract to develop a project through Vaun Developments, alongside Steven Goldberg, managing director of Goldberg Construction Group.
“I’ve marketed so many properties on the coast, I’ve seen it done well and done not so well. I’m taking those learnings into my own developments now,” he says.
The Gold Coast featured prominently in Knight Frank’s International Waterfront Index, released recently.
Knight Frank head of residential research Michelle Ciesielski said these properties often came with increased security and privacy but were also more affordable on the Gold Coast.
“Increasingly more buyers of waterfront homes on the Gold Coast are coming from the relatively more expensive cities of Sydney and Melbourne, so record prices are being achieved, most notable since the start of the pandemic,” she said.
Article source: www.theurbandeveloper.com