In the year 2000, I had been working for Mirvac only a year when it was announced that the Group had acquired the coveted New Farm “Sugar Refinery” site, located on the Brisbane River with a prime NE aspect.

Being only 23 at the time and working on a townhouse site at Sunnybank, I never dreamed that I may be asked by the then Sales Manager, Matthew Wallace, to sell on this prestigious riverfront project. It was the ultimate development in Brisbane, and a salespersons dream! However, fast-forward one year and our little sales team of four people went into launch mode, building up for a pre-release sales extravaganza.

For the first time ever, the marketing team went out on a huge limb and did a risky Expression of Interest campaign asking prospective buyers to pay $1,000 to attend a pre-release appointment where they could select their apartment.

This was a bold move! How would the market react?? Would they send their cheques?? It was indeed exciting times. Once the EOI went out, the nervous wait was on. Every morning we would ask “any cheques?”, “how many cheques?” and for about 7 or 8 days, there were no cheques to be seen. Panic started to set in and the questions were asked “was the Brisbane market not ready to pay this $1,000 refundable deposit?”. Matthew Wallace went into a Plan B mode just in case nothing arrived.

Finally, one morning, after the mail was delivered to our South Brisbane office, the eagle had landed and there must have been about 40 cheques all at once. They kept coming over the next week, and from memory we must have received about 100 cheques and there were only 85 apartments to sell in the first “Flinders” at Cutters Landing.

The rest is history really. We set our appointments over a period of three days in May 2001 and every apartment sold in this frenetic launch at lightening pace. It was the quick or the dead and in the end many people did miss out on being able to purchase. Lucky there was a stage 2, known as “Mitchell” but that’s a story for another time.

Bye for now