- Danny Andrews has launched a $1b luxury development, South Beach, on Australia’s Gold Coast.
- The project targets buyers concerned about the Middle East conflict, with prices starting at A$1m.
- Seventy of the 197 units are sold, with project work expected to be complete by the end of 2028.
A Kiwi chippie who got his start flipping houses in Waikanae has just launched his latest project: a $1 billion luxury development on Australia’s Gold Coast that’s targeting buyers worried about the war in Iran.
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Danny Andrews has been building and flipping houses since he was 15. His latest project, South Beach, is his biggest yet: two 37-floor towers of nearly 400 apartments on a 5700sqm corner site two blocks from “billionaire’s row” on Surfers Paradise Boulevard.
He spoke to OneRoof as part of the launch of the billion-dollar project to some 70 New Zealand property investors, flown over by REMAX New Zealand director Don Ha.
Both Andrews and Ha say the project’s timing could not be better, highlighting the exodus of international buyers from Dubai’s luxury apartment market since the conflict in the Middle East erupted last month.
Ha, who is expanding REMAX’s reach, says he will be showing South Beach to buyers at events in New Caledonia, Vietnam, Korea and Taiwan. Buyers who were excited about the property boom in Dubai were firmly in the frame. “Gold Coast is the new Dubai,” Ha said.
Andrews was candid about his real estate origins during his interview with OneRoof, describing his first flip, a three-bedroom townhouse in Waikanae, which he sold in 1983 for $47,000.
He was always the entrepreneur, he told OneRoof. Even as a young builder, he had a side hustle, citing the keyless electronic locker business he developed. It eventually attracted international attention, with the American leaders in the sector, Smarte Carte, buying him out in 1997.
Andrews engaged top architecture firm Bates Smart to design the curved building in two 37-story towers, sitting on six levels of carparking behind green walls. Photo / Supplied
South Beach, two blocks from the water at Broad Beach, on the Gold Coast, is part of a rapidly growing "billionaire’s row" of luxury apartment blocks. The tall tower on the right is Q1 (Queensland Number One) tower, the country’s tallest residential building. Photo / Supplied
Andrews said he had firmly established himself as a developer, building and selling glamorous houses in Auckland, when he and his wife, Glenda, decided it was time for a change.
“You can have nice things, but you need to be stimulated. I describe life as having a few sliding door moments, and this was our sliding door moment,” he said.
“We’d always enjoyed our Gold Coast holidays, and we just said, ‘What about it? Should we?’.”
The exchange rate wasn’t great, but Andrews wasn’t deterred. “I thought, ‘the money doesn’t matter’, because I’ve never had a problem making money,” he said.
The family upped sticks at the end of 1999, moving with their then-intermediate-aged daughter Sarah to the Gold Coast. “[We thought] this is a place we’d like to have a crack at. We didn’t come here with any goals other than to carry on doing what we were doing,” he said.
“You literally start with zero and you just kind of keep going.”
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Andrews found success building and flipping houses in Australia, but more memorable is the Australian deal he didn’t make, a property on Noosa Sound, near the resort town’s main street. It was going for $65,000 in the early 2000s, but he didn’t bite. “For the sake of two or three grand, we didn’t buy,” he said.
It took Andrews 10 years to leap from family homes to multi-unit buildings. His first adventure in apartment-building was a six-level property with over 50 units. That was in 2011 when Andrews was cashed up enough to take advantage of the GFC, which had thinned out the competition.
“When things are gloomy out there and people think it is never going to be good, I see opportunity,” he said. His architect approached him with plans for a multi-unit development that another developer couldn’t start. While it was a completely different lane from their usual projects, this was the turning point for the Andrews family.
“Initially, we thought ‘I don’t know much about this’. My wife and I slept on it for a few days, but we struggled to come up with one reason why we should not do this.”
Up against more experienced developers, the Andrews learned a lot.
The wellness podium has three swimming pools, along with multiple gyms, spas and relaxation rooms. Photo / Supplied
Inside, the wellness spaces on the seventh floor have views and greenery. Photo / Supplied
Apartments are designed to get views of the ocean or the waterways. Photo / Supplied
“We were selling two-bedroom units for $349,000 in that first development. People told me I was crazy for doing it at the time, because times were so tough,” he said, adding that other developers “lost their backsides”.
Their affordable homes sold, thanks to Andrews’ talent in sales and marketing. It was a relief when daughter Sarah joined the company in 2013, fresh from a stint at Macquarie Bank.
“She’d learned these disciplines around the breakfast table. She’d grown up in construction her whole life, and boy, did she blossom? She found something she really loved doing,” her father said.
Over the next decade, the company stepped up from 50 to 60-unit apartments in Southport to the buzzier, more upscale Broadbeach. Quality and design up-scaled too, led by a sculptural tower called Allegra, which Andrews completed in 2017.
More towers followed – three in Broadbeach, another on Main Beach and, most recently, a 230-unit tower in the family suburb of Robina.
Off the plan prices of apartments in one boutique tower started at A$6m with penthouses fetching A$15m, a record at the time, Andrews said. Today, that penthouse is worth A$23m, he reckoned.
“The flight to apartment living has really accelerated in the last five or six years,” he said. It is reported that a couple of penthouses in new waterfront developments have fetched $19m, while another is rumoured to have sold for A$30m.
The company tapped prestige architecture firm Bates Smart for the design of the curvy towers. Growing demand for wellness facilities in the area inspired the decision to devote the entire 5500sqm podium floor of South Beach to what Andrews calls “a circuit of wellbeing”.
Since the start of the war, global luxury apartment buyers have been abandoning Dubai, pictured, and flocking to the Gold Coast. Photo / Getty Images
It boasts three pools, a spa, Finnish and infra-red saunas, a hammam, ice and cold-plunge pools, rooms for sound healing, yoga and red-light therapy, multiple gyms and pool cabanas. For those whose relaxation is less active, there is a library, a cinema and an outdoor reading terrace.
Prices start at just over A$1m for a one-bedroom apartment and climb to A$2.395m for a three-bedroom unit. The company is keeping mum on the prices of the penthouses, which have yet to go on the market. Seventy of the 197 units in the north tower are sold, but Andrews is holding onto the south tower as a legacy for his family.
Building is expected to be done by the end of 2028. Andrews told OneRoof that projects the size of South Beach take around five years from concept to sales settling, but he still wants to do more.
“I’ll keep going until the end, I’ll be kicking the box when I’m in the coffin,” he laughed. Instead, he’s been back in Queenstown, where he is building a huge new holiday home for the family.
Andrews and his daughter call the strip of the Gold Coast between Surfers Paradise and the luxury Langham Hotel “billionaire’s row”, with out-of-state developers and buyers turning the south-east corner of Queensland into a real estate hotspot. Figures show that Surfers Paradise is Queensland’s new $4m suburb, and has more cash sales than any other postcode in Australia.
“We’ve got the Olympic Games coming through [in 2032]. We’ve hit this golden age of baby boomers migrating north to the sunshine,” Andrews said. “There’s so much money around these days - it’s just crazy.”
The company is closely watching what is happening in Miami, in the US, which he reckons is a model for the future of the Gold Coast, and Andrews maintains that his company has the edge on billionaire developers from Sydney or Melbourne.
“Those guys that come up here with their big suitcase of cash. They can bring as much money as they want, but they won’t know as much about it as we do,” he said, noting that that’s why he stays away from other markets, including Auckland, which he does not know as intimately.
Andrews said working with Don Ha’s agency to bring Kiwis across to buy tapped into Kiwis’ aspiration to have a place on the Coast. Demand is so strong, Andrews said, that the company had to “turn the tap off”.
“We’ve got so much demand, two weeks ago we did 18 sales in one week. That’s a record for us.”
Don Ha told OneRoof that he has been working with Andrews since 2017 under a referral agreement, where REMAX introduces the buyer to the company (unlike New Zealand, developers sell directly to buyers, not through what they call “retail” real estate agents). This was the first time he had brought potential buyers to see a project in person.
“Once you’re over there, you fall in love,” Ha said.
He said that the paperwork had already been signed on 10 apartments - $20m worth of deals, including a high-level three-bedroom place for $3.4m. Negotiations are underway for more properties.
“The biggest lesson I learned was that the Australian developers have a big marketing budget and they stick to it. Whereas here, our developers want the result, but they don’t want to spend the budget.”
* OneRoof travelled to the Gold Coast as a guest of REMAX New Zealand. Accommodation and flights were covered by the agency.
