Vacant Indooroopilly Bowls Club to become premium wellness precinct after selling

Four years after the doors of the Indooroopilly Bowls Club shut permanently, a new owner, and tenant, are opening a new chapter for the building.

Indooroopilly Greens will occupy the 4507 square metre property at 101 Clarence Road as a wellness precinct containing a fitness centre, yoga studio and gourmet café.

The occupier was found following the recent $1.3 million sale of the building to two local families, negotiated by Knight Frank’s Adam Willmore on behalf of liquidators Morgan Lane and Michael Griffin from Worrells Solvency and Forensic Accountants.

The former Indooroopilly Bowls Club cafe.

Mr Willmore said more than 100 enquiries from buyers with wide-ranging uses were made for the property over the four years he had been marketing it.

“It has been a long and difficult process to get to this point where the property will be sold,” he added.

“The site is essentially one strata unit that is part of the Body Corporate that also governs the 134 residential apartments on the Clarence Road property. As such, any incoming buyer needed to obtain body corporate approvals if they wanted to operate anything other than a bowls club.

The offering includes 21 exclusive use car parks with an additional 65 bays available for visitor parking.

“Unfortunately there were no club operators interested in the property at an acceptable price level and the majority of the interest in the property was from buyers with alternate uses in mind.”

Mr Willmore said the bowling greens were also zoned Sports and Recreation and sit above basement carparking so there was no development potential in the site.

“We previously had it under contract a number of times to buyers wanting to purchase it for other uses including childcare but the body corporate did not support these buyers’ use for the property,” he said.

“The residents in the apartments are pleased the space will be open again after being closed for so long and are very excited with the future plans for the property.”

Fitter Futures, the only training facility in the southern hemisphere accredited as the US-developed Brand X MethodTM Lab for youth functional fitness, will relocate to the newly acquired Indooroopilly site from the Sherwood Football Club at Chelmer.

The new venue is expected to be its flagship training centre.

Fitter Futures and Movement Vitality are expected to open at the new Indooroopilly Greens at the start of the new school term in October, while a café will open later in the year, the agents said.

Gaming machines at the former venue.

“We are the industry leaders in youth functional fitness and have an incredibly high retention rate in our programs,” Fitter Futures founder Sam Mathers said.

“We decided to relocate for a few reasons, with the major one being that it has always been part of our vision to have a state-of-the-art training facility for Fitter Futures that can cater to families.

“When it opens it will be amazing – there won’t be another training facility like it in Brisbane, especially having such a large outdoor and indoor space.

A new cafe is set to replace this one when Indooroopilly Greens opens later this year.

“We have outgrown our current space,” Ms Mathers added. “We have a thriving youth program and we’re bursting at the seams and we will now also have the space to offer programs for adults so the whole family can be involved.”

Ms Mathers said she had been looking for a new location for a year before finding the Indooroopilly site, “which fitted everything on the wish list”.

“It had to tick a lot of boxes – it had to be in Brisbane’s western suburbs, on the train line and easy to access via public transport, close to lots of schools, have lots of parking available and be visible. I couldn’t have found a better site.”

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Marc Pallisco

A former property analyst and print journalist, Marc is the publisher of realestatesource.com.au.