Developer Tim Gurner on Fortitude Valley FV development: 'It's been amazing'

“That’s the changing face of Brisbane right there,” says a passerby on Brunswick Street as demolition continued on Wednesday to make way for the third tower in developer Tim Gurner’s 910-apartment FV project in Fortitude Valley.

The chap in the shorts and thongs with his camera held aloft is not wrong; Brisbane is changing. It’s an observation impossible to avoid as the first two towers rise near their 30-storey limit above the Valley skyline.

It’s been a quite a journey to get to this third tower, says the 34-year-old Melbourne-based developer, a BRW Young Rich Lister.

But any build is a challenge, he’ll tell you. Many never make it beyond the building approval stage.

And despite some challenges, he’s confident about Brisbane’s evolution as a new world city and how Brisbane is handling development in comparison to Melbourne and Sydney.

“It’s been amazing actually,” he says of the three years since FV was announced.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for the mayor and what the council is doing up there terms of wanting to build a big city and supporting developers that are wanting to do something a bit different,” he said.

“I think it’s a really unique change from Melbourne and Sydney just to be able to get that support from a department which, you know they’re trying to get great apartments and ensure that you can do something that’s special and unique.

“Three 30-storey towers on 5000 square metres is not an easy achievement for anyone and you’re always going to run into obstacles — we had a few heritage things, you know, we wanted to do it a certain way and they worked with us to find solutions.

“Just working together if there’s a problem, to solve it … that’s certainly something you don’t see in Melbourne and it’s a really great thing for Brisbane.

“I’ve said they’re committed to building a new world city and I really believe they are.”

He’s also witnessed the city’s food and night scene continue to diversify and light up pockets of the inner city.

“You look at Alfred Street and what’s down there now, and when we connect our part of Alfred Street to that, it’s going to be a cool little café-restaurant-bar precinct.

“I think what Brisbane does much better than anyone else is ‘precinct’ … so in Melbourne, you might have Chapel St which is a gigantic stretch that sort of sprawls but in Brisbane what you do very well are those places like Emporium or James St or hopefully what FV will be, or what Tim Forrester (Aria) has done in South Brisbane.

“All those little pockets like Gasworks at Newstead where people will gravitate to and really make it a hub, those precincts are done incredibly well.

“I think that’s what gave me the confidence to do what we did at FV. It had to be big enough to bring that density and the amount of people – we’ll have 2500 people living in that building. It’s a lot of people. “

He said the landscaping, including plantings of mature trees, and honing the retail aspects would be a focus in coming months as stage one nears completion for August or September.

Winning Appliances moves from Brunswick St to claim the corner site of the “flatiron” building with a multimillion-dollar 1770 square metre showroom to open in March.

Gurner recently announced that Mantra Group’s high-end brand Peppers had bought the building management rights for FV.

“We’re really trying to deliver something that hasn’t been done in Australia before and it’s all very well being able to deliver it but then you need someone who can keep it at that level,” he said.

He cites rising labour costs over the past 14 months as one of the toughest challenges of his first Brisbane project.

“We’re building our last tower at 45 per cent more per square metre than our first stage,” he said.

“If the project hadn’t been so successful it would have killed us.”

He said talk over oversupply was distorted.

“If you look at planning permit approvals, yeah, you’ve be a bit worried but you look at what is actually being built and sold, there’s absolutely nothing.

“There may have been 15,000 permits issued but that’s irrelevant – it’s very hard to get projects up and the only numbers that people should be looking at is what has started construction, not even what’s sold, because I can tell you there’s a lot of projects in Brisbane that have been sold that will not be funded.”

As for Gurner’s future beyond the sold-out $600 million FV project, he has an Alfred Street property across the road earmarked for 300 apartments down the track, and he hopes to maintain a presence in the heart of Brisbane.

“The support we’ve had from the mayor and the council has been a really big motivator for me to stay and want to do more in Brisbane.”

The first two towers of FV are due for completion by September with the third tower to be complete in 2019.