Corcoris in the race for trackside luxury
FANCY lolling in an infinity pool beside the front straight at the Gold Coast Turf Club while horses thunder towards the finishing line?
That pool is part of a vision 70-year-old Nick Corcoris and his Melbourne property group have for land abutting the racecourse.
The vision includes multilevel buildings that would be home to apartments and a hotel, along with a rooftop restaurant and a function centre.
It’s the latest in a list of proposals stretching back to the 1990s for a vacant triangular Racecourse Drive site, none of which have got off the turf.
The land, which has a 163m frontage to the track’s home turn and straight, is within the Bundall equestrian precinct.
Three years ago the Corcoris group was in talks with the turf club over a possible joint-venture development which would have taken in some of the club’s land.
The mooted project included a hotel and apartments but nothing transpired.
Since then the club’s been going down its own track with studies on the viability of a similar project, in tandem with a developer, on a site that takes in the Dome venue area.
The Corcoris camp’s now going solo and has embarked on a quest to win development approval for a three-building plan, a move that might be seen as a case of wanting to burst out of the starting gates first. It poses the question of whether the city council will be receptive to two hotels within the equestrian precinct should a turf club proposal emerge.
Ironically, the council owned the 1.22ha Corcoris property, which was part of the Benowa sewage treatment site, until it sold it for $1.4 million in 1995.
The land has changed hands three times since then.
Stranti, a Melbourne-linked company which took the site off the city council’s hands, floated plans for a 10-storey hotel and a second building with fast-food outlets, offices and apartments.
Stranti, in racing terms, broke down in 2000 and Turf Club Australia, a company linked to developer Mark Howard, bought the site from a mortgagee for $1.85 million.
Approval was gained for a mixed-use project that included a four-level, 64-suite motel, restaurant and conference facilities.
That approval survived a turf club attempt to nobble it via the Planning and Environment Court. In 2002 Corcoris-linked Melbourne investors paid $1.9 million for the property and later tried to sell it for $6.5 million.
At a 2013 auction the site was passed in at a vendor bid of $3 million.
Two years later it was moved into a solely Corcorisowned company at $3.2 million.
The company wants to build fan-shaped buildings – two of five levels and the third, with a rooftop restaurant, of six levels. The bulk of 341 parking spaces would be in a basement.
Planning documents describe the building design as “responsive’’ to the effluent facility and the Boral concrete batching plant on the western side of Racecourse Drive – they’d both be “screened” by the street’s fig trees.
Time will tell whether the Corcoris plan will eventuate before the potential turf club project, tagged Sunlight, sees daylight.