2 | Honeycomebes Property Group Central Townsville NQN House
Honeycomebes Property Group | 3 Throughout their many years of history, Honeycombes Property Group has built a reputation of providing quality developments. The embryo of the company was founded by John Honeycombe as a residential real estate office in 1979 then transformed into a development company by his son Peter Honeycombe in 1995. The Honeycombe familyhave been doing business in regional Queensland for 100 years, since March 1913 – and has undertaken more than $1 billion inproperty projects. Each project is specially designed for the communities in which they are placed, and are created with an appreciation for the area’s unique opportunities and challenges. “We intimately understand the needs of the communities in which we develop,” says Peter, Managing Director of the Group. “By assessing those needs, and ensuring our projects deliver to them, we create developments that are in-demand. We don’t force-feed a project we’ve designed in one community onto another.” Peter himself began his career in the industry at the Brisbane office of Jones Lang LaSalle, a
4 | Honeycomebes Property Group Central Townsville - Kensington
Honeycomebes Property Group | 5 global real estate services firm. There, he worked in commercial sales and leasing, specialising in CBD developments and new projects. As part of that role, he worked within Townsville on several large commercial projects before joining HoneycombesReal Estate –his father’s small real estate business – in 1991. When Peter joined the family firm, they were working on small house and land packages. A few years later, however, they decided to move into medium-density housing. After one of their first clients defaulted on their payments, the Honeycombes’ decided to take over the project themselves. They achieved quick success, and in the intervening yearsHoneycombes Property Group has successfully completed a further 27 projects. RELATIONSHIP DEVELOPERS Today, Honeycombes Property Group operates mainly in regional Queensland. Their work is varied – in recent years they’ve done projects valued at $2 million all the way to single stage projects valued at $177 million. They work in both the commercial and residential sectors, with roughly 70 per cent of their business comprised of residential developments. “We’re a part of the regional community’s we work in, and we understand what their needs are,” Peter says, re-iterating what makes the Group’s developments special. “That means we can tailor our projects to those needs.” When assessing a development opportunity, Peter says they look for areas where needs are not being fulfilled. The company then works to fully understand those needs through extensive research. From there, Honeycombes Property Group manages the developments from start to finish, from site acquisition all the way through to their customer care program – which lasts for six years after a project’s completion. “We want to make sure the users and the owners of our product get the best out of that product,” Peter explains. “An investor needs to get a maximum return, with the least hassles, and the highest level of occupancy. And an occupier or tenant needs to be totally fulfilled too.” Honeycombes Property Group fosters strong relationships with all of their key stakeholders, not just their tenants and investors. Themajorityof their internal staff, for instance, have been with the company for more than six years and many suppliers have doing business with them for more than 15. Successful Par tners delivering quality results rpsgroup.com.au Survey Urban Planning Landscape Architecture Urban Design Environment Project Management With a truly national presence, RPS is involved in some of today’s most impor tant and challenging urban development projects. Our technical and strategic expertise allows us to deliver high quality and commercially viable projects for our clients. RPS provided survey and titling exper tise to Honeycombes Property Group throughout the entire Central Development project.
6 | Honeycomebes Property Group “We always try to deal with local suppliers and service providers in the communities in which we work,” Peter adds. “So we make sure those relationships are very strong.” The Group also has strong relationships with their joint-venture partners, who have included public and private companies as well as local and state government organisations. In recent years, for example, Honeycombes has worked in partnership with Queensland Rail and the Cairns Port Authority. Those types of organisations are invaluable when it comes to achieving the level of local understanding the Group demands. Peter credits the strength of all his relationships to a few key factors, starting with communication. That doesn’t just mean communicating when something goes wrong, he clarifies, but also when things go right. “It’s important to value the contributions of everybody,” he says. “Just because someone’s a supplier or financier and we pay their bills doesn’t mean we take them for granted. We’re continually providing them with feedback on how to improve, and crediting them for the things they do well.” As a result of their longstanding relationships at every level, Honeycombes Property Group can be assured – and can assure clients – of quality outcomes. EXCEEDING BENCHMARKS The quality outcomes that Honeycombes PropTownsville Central (Stage 1 Commercial)
Honeycomebes Property Group | 7 erty Group consistently achieves have not gone unrecognised by the industry. At the 2012 UDIA Awards, for example, the Group was the winner in the Urban Renewal category for ‘Central,’ an innovative new lifestyle precinct in Townsville’s CBD. Central offers a mix of one, two and three bedroom luxury apartments master-planned around retail and commercial hubs. The UDIA judges were impressed by the “transformative impact” of Central on Townsville and its CBD. They recognised the commitment of Honeycombes Property Group to continuous improvement throughout every stage of the project, and also noted its success at attracting both commercial and residential tenants. And that award was far from the Group’s first. That came in 2000, when they won both a state and national UDIA Urban Renewal Award for the development of MetroQuays, which was a car park they converted into 90 apartments.“We’re honoured to receive those awards,” Peter says. “It’s very easy for us to continue to focus on what we think is important, but it’s always critical we check up with the industry, and ensure we’re meeting or exceeding the expectation there as well.” “We have to ensure we’re not resting on our laurels,” he adds. “We have to make sure we’re keeping up with the benchmark set by the whole industry, not just ourselves.” Another part of keeping up with that benchmark is operating in an environmentally responsible way. Sustainability and efficiency are becomTownsville Central (Stage 1 Residential)
8 | Honeycomebes Property Group Central Townsville - Paddington FairweatherProberts
Honeycomebes Property Group | 9 ing more important to the industry with each passing year, and Peter says those considerations have long been “critical” to the Honeycombes Property Group. “We’ve been managing our developments in an environmentally sensitive way since one of our first projects in 1997,” he says. “It’s the outright obligation of our industry to ensure that’s being considered, and we’re always looking to adopt leading edge environmental standards.” As anexampleofHoneycombes’ commitment to achieving optimal environmental outcomes, Peter cites Itara at Riverway – for that project, the Group worked with a team of environmental professionals to relocate two 60 tonne rain-trees to a nearby recreational area on the edge of a site. For their efforts there, Honeycombes was awarded a UDIA North Queensland Award for Excellence in Environmentally Sustainable Development. COMMUNITIES WITHIN COMMUNITIES Peter estimates that 20 to 25 per cent of their customers are repeat buyers – which is the best indicator there is that they are meeting the needs, he says. Moving forward, he adds that he would like to see that number grow even higher. To accomplish that, he says the Group will continue to focus on relationship management, and will continue to deliver quality mixed-use developments that understand and meet the demands of communities within Queensland. “We’re going to continue to focus on projects like Central – projects where we’ll have restaurants, cafés, shops, cinemas, offices and residential spaces,” he concludes. “We want to develop projects where we can be a community within a community.”
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