Interesting Mermaid sell-off is developing
ASHORT Mermaid Beach street that was intended to have a slim tower and two “elegant” high-rises dominating its highway entrance has been thrown back into the development spotlight.
Mermaid Ave made headlines four years ago over a project called Elegance, planned on a former Hungry Jack’s site, and another affectionately tagged the Blade Runner.
One site had been bought for nearly $7 million and the other for more than $34m.
Neither project has seen the light of day and at the other end of the L-shaped street, where it connects with Alexander Ave, a developer planning a high-rise called Naia appears to have shelved the idea.
Against this backdrop, the Chinese owners of another Mermaid Ave site, via company Jia Tai, have put it on the market with $11m-plus aspirations.
Any would-be buyer of the holding surely will be taking a close look at what’s gone before in Mermaid Ave.
It’s sprouted just one high-rise and that was the 27-apartment Alexis, which also has an Alexander Ave frontage, and was completed by developer Grant Dempsey in 2005.
Ten years later the “drought” looked set to be broken when the owners of a highway-front site on the southern side of Mermaid Ave gained approval for a sharpedged 32-floor tower.
The site, today still partly occupied by the Tropicana Motel, was offloaded to Taiwanese company Fong Da for $6.85m.
Fong Da intended to make the so-called Blade Runner tower its Australian debut but got cold feet, tried to sell the near-1600sq m holding in 2017, and still owns it today.
At the same time as Fong Da was buying the holding, a company owned by the Hubei Provincial People’s Government in China was getting the hots over a former burger site on the other side of the street.
The previous owner of the property had paid $4.268m for it, gained approval for two towers, and three days later flicked it to the Hubei company for an eye-opening $34.1m. The Elegance towers, at 47 and 49 levels, were announced and were trumpeted as providing a mecca for health and wellbeing – not words that could later be applied to the venture.
Hubei appeared to be cooking with gas when it achieved a run of early sales.
The good times didn’t last and in 2019 a Surfers Paradise sales office was closed and marketing aborted.
The site for which Jia Tai is chasing a buyer is 1904sq m, is on the southern side of Mermaid Ave, and is occupied by tenanted low-rise buildings Myana and Leemar Court.
The units apparently gross $251,000 a year, which means Jia Tai owners Tai Pan and Jia Guo are getting a return on the $4.72m they invested in the site.
They are property-rich – they bought a Tallai home for $1.81m in 2015 and have more than $13m outlaid in the Sydney and Brisbane markets.
Whether buyers will be swimming towards their “Mermaid” holding will be interesting.
Their price target of at least $11m exceeds the $9.7m rateable value of the development-approved Elegance site, which has two street frontages and is nearly twice as big.
There’s no sign of the Jia Tai site having any tower approvals.