Billionaire City-Maker Puts Large Springfield Landholding on the Block

Billionaire developer Maha Sinnathamby has been riding an endless wave of activity for more than three decades as the founding father of Australia’s largest masterplanned city.

And, still, he is perpetually looking for ways to maintain the momentum of growth at Greater Springfield, 25km south-west of Brisbane.

In a rare offering, Sinnathamby’s Springfield City Group is putting a 12.7ha development site on the block to “inject a new wave of activity”—as he puts it—into what is already one of Australia’s fastest growing regions.

The mixed-use City West site is being taken to market with initial approvals in place for a variety of uses—including convenience retail, large format retail, commercial offices, entertainment and leisure, and medium density residential.

“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, just to name a few,” Sinnathamby said.

“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.”

The landholding is listed for sale with Colliers’ Lachlan MacGillivray and Harry Dever, in conjunction with Stonebridge Property’s Julian White and Philip Gartland.

The expressions of interest campaign closes on March 15.

”New retail floorspace needs to grow by 2.2 million square metres to service the population growth over the next decade,” MacGillivray said. “Hence, key retail development sites such as City West are becoming critical as retail demand outweighs supply.”

Gartland said what made the offering so unique was “from a planning perspective, Greater Springfield is like no other city”.

“The entire City West precinct already benefits from development rights of up to 281,560sq m of GFA (gross floor area) with an array of permissible uses,” he said.