Teeing up for a big helping of sunshine

A digitally-enhanced image of Lend Lease's developments planned for a golf resort near the Hyatt Regency Coolum.

An Australian developer is building private homes around the outskirts of a luxury Queensland hotel in a move to rejuvenate the resort it bought three years ago.

Lend Lease owns the 150ha golfing resort managed by the Hyatt Regency at Coolum, about an hour north of Brisbane.

The resort, which the company purchased from Japanese firm Kumagai Gumi, is on Coolum Beach between the resort towns of Noosa and Maroochydore and Mooloolaba. It is renowned for its PGA course and in 2002 hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.

Golf is one of the prime attractions for guests, 80 per cent of whom are Australian and the rest from overseas, mostly New Zealand.

The expansion of the golfing resort is similar to Matarangi Beach Estates' plans in the Coromandel, where housing sections have been created around the edge of an 18-hole international golf course.

This project is selling villas at the Home Show in Auckland this month.

Lend Lease's plan is to capitalise on the Queensland golfing resort's open areas by developing 57 new private residences on its outskirts.

The houses have their own roads separate from the resort's network and their own secure entranceways, creating gated communities on the resort's edges.

The houses are being developed in rural settings near the championship fairways with long views across the greens, lakes and waterways.

A handful of new homes have already been completed.

Sunshine Coast project director Murray Middleton said the scheme would result in a revitalisation of the resort which Lend Lease bought in September 2003.

The company has approval for 151 new houses, 300 new hotel rooms and an extra nine golf holes. This could see the Hyatt's capacity doubled.

The resort is already a large community, with its own town centre and shops and a large conference centre with meeting rooms.

Guests are given bikes to cycle around the resort's internal roading network which bars all vehicles except service vans, trucks and golf carts. Guest cars are parked in a separate area, away from the rooms and hotel foyer.

Sixty per cent of the site will be kept as open recreational or conservation space but a series of new resort villages will be created around the perimeter.

Lend Lease has subdivided 40 sections at its Visage project on the Mt Coolum side of the Hyatt, between the 12th and 17th fairways. This project will bring a mixture of houses and apartments selling for A$750,000 ($882,000) to A$2.07 million and is due to be finished by 2008. Construction began two years ago.

Lend Lease has created a separate residential project for 17 houses at Vantage on the northern side of the Hyatt resort. Sections are selling for around A$370,000.

Megan Houston, a Lend Lease spokeswoman, said 15 houses and six apartments had been completed in stage one of Visage. Stage two, 13 houses and six apartments, was being marketed.

South of the Hyatt, Lend Lease and landowner Tricontinental have developed a gated housing community at Twin Waters, 10 minutes from Maroochydore. Lend Lease bought into this A$400 million project between the Maroochy River and Sunshine Motorway in 1996.

HYATT REGENCY COOLUM

* A 150ha Queensland golfing resort with a 1.2km Sunshine Coast beach frontage.

* 57 houses being developed around an existing 324-room five-star resort.

* Many houses in the Visage housing project to the south are complete.

* Development is under way at the new Vantage on the northern side of the resort.


* Anne Gibson was a guest of Lend Lease at Hyatt Regency Coolum.