King Tide returns holiday haven to family embrace
KRIS Caris cried the day would-be developers paid $1.55 million for her family’s $37,000 beachfront holiday apartment at Broadbeach.
Today she is the happiest lady on the beach. The apartment, in the King Tide low-rise, is back in the Brisbane family’s hands.
The bulk of the $1.55 million received five years ago is still with the family too, thanks to the threebedroom apartment being bought by Kris from receivers for $381,000.
It was Kris’s grandmother, the late Marego Kritharis, who paid $37, 000 for the apartment in 1970.
Kris was only five when she first holidayed there.
Her excitement at regaining the keys to Unit 1, King Tide, centres around the fact that the many happy memories built up over the years will be added to for many years to come.
At times during the eighties and nineties, as the extended Kritharis family grew, there were four generations holidaying at King Tide at Christmas simultaneously.
‘‘We had up to 14 family members, aged from two to 80, in a three-bedroom unit,’’ Kris says.
‘‘They were fun times enjoyed by all, with swimming, fishing, and sunning and then eating together in one unit.’’
The fun times ended when Kris’s dad, George Kritharis, who had inherited the apartment after his mother’s death in 2000, was approached by representatives of company Bullish Bear Holdings five years ago.
The company, associated with Beau Hartnett and Craig Perry, was attempting to create a redevelopment site by amalgamating King Tide’s 35 apartments.
Bullish Bear secured 17 of the apartments and George Kritharis got the top price of $1.55 million for the ground-floor unit.
Receivers, who were l a t e r a p p o i n t e d t o B u l l i s h B e a r , embarked earlier this year on a sell-off of the company’s King Tide holdings.
Kris’s husband, Charles, says that when the contracts were drawn up in 2007 to sell Unit 1 for the sevenfigure sum, there was only one person who cried like a child for the family not to sell.
‘‘That was Kris – the unit to her was priceless.’’