This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
BILLIONAIRE Maha Sinnathamby’s Springfield City Group is looking to offload a 12.7-hectare development parcel in Australia’s largest master-planned city.
Located about 25 kilometres south west of Brisbane “City West” is located in fast-growing Greater Springfield and offers a versatile mixed-use development site, with permissible uses that have already received initial approvals including convenience retail, large format retail, commercial offices, entertainment and leisure, and medium-density residential.
Sinnathamby and business partner Bob Sharpless have spent more than three decades planning and developing Springfield, which covers 2,860 hectares of land with a CBD referred to as the “Knowledge Precinct”.
“It’s now time to offer this unique site to the market. The development will inject a new wave of activity into Greater Springfield and provide further amenity to the rapidly growing region,” Sinnathamby said.
He said “a lot of the heavy lifting has already been completed over the past 32 years” with $18 billion of social and physical infrastructure projects completed to date, including the $1.2 billion Springfield Rail network with two stations, the $80 million Brighton Homes Arena and the $85 million Mater Hospital.
The landholding is listed for sale through Colliers’ Lachlan MacGillivray and Harry Dever, in conjunction with the Stonebridge Property agents Julian White and Philip Gartland.
Greater Springfield’s population growth of 3.7% per annum puts it on track to exceed 75,800 people by 2036, making it one of Australia’s fastest growing regions, according to a Deepend Services Report. MacGillivray said new retail floorspace needs to grow by 2.2 million sqm to service the population growth over the next decade.
“Hence, key retail development sites such as City West are becoming critical as retail demand outweighs supply.”
More than 33 large format retail users are not currently represented in the Greater Springfield catchment but are represented in similar size catchments in Queensland, Dever said, and in there is also demand for an additional three to four full-line supermarkets to support the main trade area.
The main trade area for large format retail expenditure was estimated at $709.9 million in 2023 and is forecast to grow to $1.83 billion in 2036 at an average growth rate of 7.6%.
Gartland said that from a planning perspective, Greater Springfield is “like no other city”. The entire City West precinct already has development rights of up to 281,560 sqm of gross floor area across an array of uses.
Sinnathamby last year went on the record in News Corp publications saying he wanted to extend the Knowledge Precinct in the mould of the Texas Medical Centre – self-described as the largest medical complex world with 120,000 employees and 10 million patient visits each year.
