More than 30,000 square metres of new office space is on the drawing board in Newcastle West after developers scrapped plans for a high-rise school in favour of a 14-storey commercial building.
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Core Project Group has lodged a development application with Newcastle City Council for a $43 million Hunter Street office building called Birdwood Business Centre.
The development will include eight storeys of offices, ground-floor retail and 233 parking spaces over five levels. The combined floor area of the retail and office space will be almost 11,000 square metres.
It will be the third large commercial building planned for an area the council has identified as a future central business district.
READ MORE:
- High-rise school plans (September 30, 2017)
- Doma’s Store project (April 20, 2018)
- Council moves west (December 8, 2017)
The council has announced it will move into Core’s 9000-square-metre Gateway stage-two development under construction on Stewart Avenue.
Doma Group’s planned $200 million redevelopment of the Store building site in Hunter Street includes 13,000 square metres of commercial space anchored by yet-to-be-announced state government tenants.
The three projects help address concerns that booming inner-city Newcastle could become a residential retirement village rather than a magnet for new jobs.
Core Project Group director Tom Elliot said the company was in discussions with potential tenants from inside and outside Newcastle for its latest project.
“We’re negotiating with a couple of tenants, but it’s still early days,” Mr Elliot said. “There’s been significant interest.
“It’s a very large commercial business precinct, and as such we want to make sure we get the right tenants on board.”
The redevelopment includes a laneway connecting Hunter Street with King Street and Birdwood Park, which the council plans to beautify. It also preserves the original parts of the historic Army Drill Hall on the site.
The Newcastle Herald reported in September that Core planned to build a high-rise school as part of a $140 million redevelopment between Stewart Avenue and National Park Street.
A Holiday Inn hotel, high-rise apartment block for seniors and childcare centre are under construction on the site, but the school is off the drawing board.
“There were some road blocks there as far as state and federal funding models go,” Mr Elliot said.
“The state and federal governments unfortunately don’t have a funding model in place that suits a vertical school.
“We spent close to 12 months trying to get this to work, but unfortunately … we were the pioneers and we were a bit early, but hopefully in the next couple of years the governments will get some form of funding models in place so these vertical schools can get built.”
The state government has committed funds to build high-rise public schools at Parramatta and Surrey Hills as it plans for a projected 164,000 extra school places by 2031.
But Core’s proposal for an independent school was a bridge too far.
“It’s a little bit more complicated, because it’s got to get driven and led by the independents, but at the same time the funding still comes from the state and federal governments,” Mr Elliot said.
