Currumbin Valley farm sells at 500% discount after 12 years

The Neumann family, which has emerged as the new owner of a hard-to-move Currumbin Valley property on which the Marist Brothers used to run stock, might have been aided in the deal by ‘muddied’ waters.

A company directed by canny brothers John, 85, and Bruce Neumann, 80, has picked up the 153ha property, Martha’s Farm, for $15.25 million.

The seller, an arm of the now Canadian-owned Aveo group, had paid developer David Devine a busty $75 million for it 12 years earlier.

The Neumanns’ purchase ended a six-year quest to find a buyer for the property.

It’s emerged that they had been eyeing it for months, if not longer – they registered company Martha’s Farm back in November.

They eventually ‘won’ the property after none of the scores of would-be buyers who had eyed the rolling site came through with an offer that was solid and also acceptable to the Canadians.

It seems those buyers might have fallen by the wayside because of the implications of a city council move in 2018 – it tainted the waters when it came to making money out of residential development on the ‘farm’.

More accurately, a change to flood mapping raised the flood level of some of the land significantly.

That meant, in effect, that the 348-lot subdivision approved to go on a major part of the site might no longer be viable.

The farm covers 153ha.

A buyer would be faced with the challenge of providing a greater area for flood storage.

They’d be restricted from adding other land into their development plans as compensation because the property’s not in the South-East Queensland Regional Plan’s urban footprint.

Hence, it seems, the other would-be buyers ran for the hills and the Neumanns, past masters at dealing with difficult sites, spotted an opportunity. They perhaps realised that with the Gold Coast in a far from healthy state in terms of land for new housing, there could be pressure to add Martha’s into the urban footprint.

Apparently not all of the farm is covered by the original development approval.

The upshot, should the whole farm be included in the urban footprint, might be that the Neumanns could be sitting on a property for which they could gain a new – and possibly far more lucrative – approval.

The government and city council could be winners too, getting a lot of dedicated environmental land at nil cost.

Meanwhile, some of the previous owners of Martha’s Farm could be interested observers as the Neumann intentions emerge.

Noel Gordon’s then-listed company Gordon Pacific, which built Main Beach high-rises Madison Point and Park Lane, bought the property from the Marist Brothers for $13.3 million in 1988.

He had ideas of putting a golf course on the farm to service guests in a mooted beachfront project at Currumbin.

The property was sold for $23.5 million in 1990 to Japan’s Co-You group, which gained a green light for a hotel and 645 houses and apartments but retreated and sold out to David Devine for $27 million in 2003.

He went through a torrid approvals journey – he gained the nod for a 530-title project called the Hideaway – before selling out to FKP (later Aveo) for $75 million in 2008.

This article from the Gold Coast Bulletin originally appeared as “Martha’s Farm in Currumbin Valley may prove rich pickings for Neumann family”.