Grazing land to gold for Usher
PHIL Usher, a multifaceted property investor who’s sitting on more than a million hectares of Queensland cattle stations, looks set to kick a goal on a piece of former grazing land at Coomera.
Three years ago the very unassuming Phil, probably best known on the Gold Coast as the H2O man, checked out a property on the doorstep of the then mooted Coomera Town Centre.
The Brisbane-based developer liked what he saw, and the potential the property held, and wasn’t going to leave it sitting on the shelf for someone else to put in their shopping trolley.
Phil went on to pay one of the major long-term owners in the area, Christine Thomson, $8.5 million for the more than 18ha of scrubby land.
Now, with the first doors set to open at the town centre before Christmas, Phil’s set to make his $8.5 million investment work.
He’s seeking a city council green light for nearly 400 townhouses and apartments.
The 52-year-old builder cut his construction teeth working for a Gold Coast residential developer in 1985 and went into business on his own two years later. He builds around 600 townhouses a year, along with retirement/aged care projects.
The first Usher townhouses on the Gold Coast were at Pacific Pines in the late 1990s.
More than a decade ago Phil went ‘high’ with six- and seven-level apartment buildings called Varsity Apartments on Main at Varsity Lakes.
A 120-townhouse community at Pacific Pines followed but it was the 2008 purchase for $44 million of two development sites overlooking the Broadwater in Southport that really put the Usher name on the Gold Coast property radar screen.
Those towers carry the H2O name and they were completed on the larger of the two Marine Pde sites in 2012 at the tail end of the GFC.
They house shops, offices and 356 apartments but Phil never has put them on the market, electing instead to rent them.
Construction is under way on the second of Phil’s Marine Pde sites, this time a BDAdesigned single tower with 236 apartments, shops, restaurants, offices and medical-centre space.
The building won’t be retained – it’s already being marketed with the object of finding a single buyer who will take it lock, stock and barrel.
The Coomera project planned by Philip Usher Constructions is right in the centre of a development hotspot and has a train station and the town centre almost on the doorstep.
Phil’s intending to build 235 townhouses of up to three levels and 159 apartments in buildings with up to seven floors.
The developer has become a big-time farmer since buying Baneba Station from the late Arthur Earle’s family 20 years ago. Usher Pastoral today owns some 1.2 million hectares in far southwest Queensland, more than half that holding acquired last year with the purchase, reportedly for around $20 million, of two Channel Country stations.