REMEMBER WHEN

GOLD COAST BULLETIN Thursday July 22, 2004

CITIUS, altius, forties (faster, higher, stronger). With apologies to Athens, the famous Olympic motto also applied to the Gold Coast.

Carpenters such as Mark Novak were driving a booming economy, with residential development in the region hitting $720.9 million in the 2003-04 financial year — up a whopping $91 million on the previous 12 months. Tourism was also on the boil.

Holiday-makers were leaving their cars at home to take advantage of discount airfares, leading to a record 2.5 million people passing through Gold Coast Airport. That was a 16.5 per cent increase on 2002-03.

A soaring symbol of this growth was the Q1 superpower at Surfers Paradise which became the tallest building on the strip the previous day.

At 50 storeys it was 3m taller than the previous recordholder, Chevron Renaissance — and there was still another 30 storeys to go. It opened in 2005.

The value of residential construction on the Coast burst through the $720 million mark, and developers with dollar signs in their eyes turned the Coast into one of the biggest construction sites in the country.

In the previous 12 months the value of development has rocketed from $630 million to $720.9 million, with no sign of a slowdown.

Despite the increase in spending on existing homes, construction of new houses continued to drive the market on the Gold Coast.

The Coast’s largest land-release developer, Stockland, will release more than 5000 lots in the next seven years.