Lloyd Williams’ Hudson Conway ditches St Kilda Road development plans and on-sells site
Developer Hudson Conway, headed by billionaire businessman Lloyd Williams, has quietly sold its development site at 557 St Kilda Road, Melbourne.
The site dates back to 2007, when Stockland paid Vision Australia $28.3 million for the larger site. The property – which housed the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind – was slated for a $200 million, 20-storey apartment on part of the 1.5-hectare site – a project that Stockland hoped to have finished mid-2011.
But Stockland merely renovated the historic bluestone building that accommodates the popular Belgian Beer Café and sold the larger portion of the subdivided property to its tenant for about $7 million.
The 9,031-square-metre block remaining block with about 64 metres of frontage to each of St Kilda Road and Moubray Street was then sold by Stockland to Hudson Conway in 2009 for about $22 million.
Hudson Conway obtained a new permit to build 329 apartments and 369 underground car parks.
A three-tiered SJB Architects-designed tower that rises 23 levels at its highest was approved by Planning Minister Matthew Guy.
With vendor terms of 25% deposit, and the balance in two years at 6.5% interest, sources expected the site to fetch about $27 million. It was marketed through Knight Frank agents Paul Henley and Ken Smirk in conjunction with CBRE agents Mark Wizel and Martin O'Sullivan.
