Developer ING Real Estate has been buoyed by last week’s green light to progress its long-awaited $200 million Victoria Quay redevelopment, which was the subject of extended community consultation last year.
Developer ING Real Estate has been buoyed by last week’s green light to progress its long-awaited $200 million Victoria Quay redevelopment, which was the subject of extended community consultation last year.
ING will now prepare a development application for the project together with Fremantle Ports, after a new contemporary design option was endorsed by a Fremantle community forum.
The chosen design features two six-storey buildings containing between 13,000 and 15,000 square metres of commercial office space and about 12,000sq m of retail and entertainment floor space.
It will be a substantial landmark on the port site. ING will also restore the old police station, immigration building and C-Shed.
The decision follows months of public consultation, during which time concerns were raised over the bulk and scale of the proposed designs.
ING Real Estate Development chief executive Greg Boyd said an application would be submitted to the City of Fremantle within the next two months.
“We believe it was a true public consultation process. We will follow this outcome and will continue to keep the community informed,” Mr Boyd said.
In West Perth, the group has planning approval for a 12,000sq m, five-storey office building at 836 Wellington Street called Wellington Central, between its prominent Harbour Town development and RAC WA building.
Mr Boyd said that, provided pre-commitment was secured shortly, ING would go out to tender on Wellington Central mid-year and hoped to have construction completed by the first quarter of 2009.
Designed by architects Cameron Chisolm and Nicol, the building will have two levels of underground parking and a small retail component at ground level.
“The St Georges Terrace addresses are getting a lot of competition right now but we’re pitching to a different part of the market,’’ Mr Boyd told WA Business News. ‘‘We would see a mining or engineering type tenant as a good fit for our building.’’
ING has another card to play nearby, with a 3,500sq m site to the rear of the RAC WA building where it is likely to build a boutique office development of around 8,000sq m.
Mr Boyd said there was no great urgency to build on the site and ING would wait to see how the Wellington Central project fared first.
The company also has bonus plot ratio on its Harbour Town retail outlet, which gives it further capacity to expand, however it has determined there is no immediate demand for it.
Other projects under way include the stage three expansion of Lakeside Joondalup Shopping Centre for the ING Retail Fund, which will add a further 30,000sq m of retail space to the centre.
An $80 million redevelopment and expansion of the Armadale Shopping City is also in progress with a Target store set to open in mid-2007 and a food court/alfresco area by early 2008.
Mr Boyd said WA was a cornerstone of ING’s original wholesale retail fund of the 1980s and it was hard to see the group’s interests in the state not growing in the coming years.
