Brutalist office hits market with development upside
One of the Lower North Shore’s most distinctive buildings – beside a new Metro station – is for sale as an investment with development upside.
Prosper Group has listed the Brutalist office at 28-34 Clarke Street, Crows Nest, after 14 years.
Built in 1972, designed by Kerr and Smith, formerly known as the St Leonards Centre and the Bank Staff Training Centre, it contains 4823 square metres of modernised area over five storeys.
There are also four basement levels with 50 car parks.
The site spans 1236 sqm – one of only four to share the same block as the Metro station, which opened in 2024 putting commuters into Martin Place in seven minutes.
Guide is $35 million.
Development upside
The listing comes as planning reforms reshape Crows Nest – a NSW Government’s Transport Oriented Development rezoning providing capacity for 5900 additional homes.
The MU1 Mixed Use parcel has a 62-metre height limit – c18 levels – and a floor space ratio of 6:1 under the current controls.
For the holding, that equates to a theoretical maximum of about 7416 sqm of gross floor area.
However, property-specific studies put the capacity at over 10,925 sqm (continues below).
“Neighbouring sites have higher floor space ratios of 10:1 and 11.5:1 while several properties near the Metro are progressing through State Significant Development pathways at heights exceeding the base TOD controls,” Stanton Hillier Parker’s Chris Veitch, who is marketing 28 Clarke St with Chris Hartigan and JLL’s Dylan McEvoy and Gordon McFadyen, said.
“A 42-storey seniors housing scheme at 378-398 Pacific Highway illustrates the scale of planning-led intensification occurring across the precinct,” according to the executive.
Mr McFadyen added “the building’s heritage character is an important part of the site’s adaptive reuse proposition”.
“Preliminary design concepts envision an adaptive reuse outcome that incorporates the original building façade, commercial space and basement levels into a residential tower, creating a differentiated product in a market increasingly dominated by conventional apartment schemes,” he said.
The office, nowadays known as the Oxley Corporate Office Centre, is fully leased with a short (two year) weighted average lease expiry.
Prior to 2001 it was owned by GIO Property Services.
The state government’s accelerated precinct program is designed to accommodate nearly 60,000 homes across Greater Sydney over 15 years, with Crows Nest, six kilometres from the CBD, among the targeted growth areas.
More than 3000 apartments are in the suburb’s planning pipeline, the agents said.
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