Site for Eureka’s more golden sister tower in Melbourne’s Southbank listed with $25 million price tag

Melburnians may have double the reason to either love or loathe the city skyline in a few years’ time, with the site for a proposed sister skyscraper to the post-modern Eureka Tower listed for sale.

Source: Skyscrapercity.com

The 2,642-square-metre site at 70 Southbank Boulevard is directly across the road from the Eureka Tower and has been listed with a $25 million price tag.

It is being sold via an international public expressions of interest campaign managed by CBRE’s Mark Wizel and Joshua Rutman closing on August 8.

The proposed 226-metre, 72-storey tower is designed by Nonda Katsalidis of Fender Katsalidis architects, who also designed the controversial Eureka Tower.

It will be quite a bit shorter than the Eureka Tower, which has 92 floors and is 300 metres high.

The $400 million design incorporates a gold strip rising up above to the very top, complementing the shiny gold cap on top of the Eureka Tower.

The site is owned by Katsalidis and Adrian Valmorbida from the Valmorbida family, who have put it up for sale almost a year after receiving a planning permit for the tower.

They had to battle with the City of Melbourne to gain approval for the building, which is set to feature 532 apartments, six levels of office space, a fresh food market and ground-floor retail.

“Eureka Tower, which 70 Southbank Boulevard, has been replicated on from an architectural perspective is well known as part of the fabric of life in central Melbourne,” says Katsalidis.

“We wanted to re-create elements of what we had achieved at Eureka and apply it to 70 Southbank Boulevard. It’s a brilliantly located site with a huge variety of optional uses and tremendous potential for a developer to shape Melbourne’s skyline with their own brush."

The site is the former head office of international explosives and fertilising giant Incitec Pivot and is currently in use as office accommodation.

Wizel says significant interest is expected from both local andoff shore developers “that recognise the difficulty in obtaining large corner sites that provided potential for apartment projects with substantial vistas in all directions”.

The site is bounded by City Road, Southbank Boulevard and Fawkner Street and has 150 metres of street frontage.

“Early developer interest has centred around this site housing the next major residential project on the edge of the Melbourne CBD,” says Wizel.

“Sites of this size in the luxury precinct of Southbank are not readily available for acquisition and, as a result, we are anticipating strong interest from local and overseas buyers, with a particularly high level of enquiry expected from Singaporean, Malaysian and mainland Chinese developers, all of whom will be attracted by the site’s proximity to the Crown Casino complex, Melbourne’s arts and cultural precinct as well as Southgate and the sporting precinct of the MCG, Rod Laver Arena and AAMI Stadium.”

Wizel says Asian developers have invested $450 million in Melbourne development opportunities over the past 18 months “in order to diversify into a proven residential market that is sought after by owner occupiers, investors and tenants”.

Rutman says it is rare for a site that has the potential for Nonda Katsalidis-designed, permit-approved residential tower to come to the market for public competition.

Katsalidis says the partners are putting the property up for sale to allow them to “go in different directions”.

“I know that both our firm Fender Katsalidis and the project managers Stralliance would be happy to remain involved in some capacity in the project moving forward, as we believe it will be Melbourne’s next iconic residential tower,” says Katsalidis.