Japanese property giant Daikyo has returned to Queensland with some new ideas in mind.
Daikyo — the one-time of owner of a string of Queensland tourism assets including five-star hotels, an island resort and championship golf courses — has returned almost a decade after exiting the Australian market.
It is expanding internationally again and Brisbane is its first port of call.
The Tokyo-based property giant’s “happy memories” from a heady era of Queensland property development and investment as well as research indicating “more opportunities” has led to it choosing Brisbane over Sydney as the headquarters for its future Australian ventures.
“We’re starting here again — from scratch,” said Daikyo Australia’s newly-appointed managing director Hiroshi Mori.
He said the company’s financial troubles from 2005 that led to it selling up its enviable Australian portfolio, most of which was on the Gold Coast and in Cairns, were water under the bridge.
“Financially, we are back in a very strong position,” he told Prime Site
Although the company’s new international office in Brisbane’s Edward St is still being fitted out, Mr Mori said it was already actively pursuing opportunities in the local market.
“We’re eager to bring our expertise to a joint venture partnership with a local Australian company,” he said.
But he said this time around the company was not rolling the dice on tourism assets but looking to invest in residential property developments — initially in the Brisbane CBD and fringe.
“Longer term, we’ll continue to look broadly at prospects around Australia,” he said.
Mr Mori said compared to Sydney and Melbourne, Daikyo’s research indicated the residential sector in Brisbane offered a “much bigger” window of opportunity to re-enter the Australian market.
He said it planned to build, sell and manage properties that targeted the owner-occupier rather than investment market and hoped to debut its Lions Mansion high-rise apartment brand for the first time outside of Japan.
“If there is an opportunity we would like to brand a building here with Lions Mansion,” he said.
Daikyo is one of Japan’s largest builders of condominiums and over the past 50 years has supplied about 400,000 units across 6800 complexes.
But Mr Mori said diminishing demand due to Japan’s contracting and ageing population also had prompted the company to look beyond the domestic market for new opportunities.
“The Japanese economy is facing a number of challenges stemming both from natural disasters and socio-economic influences,” he said. “So for Daikyo, a place like Queensland where the population is growing at a rate higher than the national average, economic growth is strong, and business conditions are favourable, offers excellent potential.”
Original article published at www.news.com.au by Phil Bartsch, The Courier Mail 21/3/2014