Wel.Co spends $23m on Thornhill Park residential site
Wel.Co is paying $23 million to private education entrepreneur, builder and City of Wyndham councillor, Intaj Khan, for a residential development site in Melbourne’s west Thornhill Park.
The 32 hectare tract at 288-310 Paynes Road can be subdivided into about 400 lots.
The property was one of four in the growth corridor which the politician listed a year ago with total price hopes of c$60m.
Its disposal comes a week after Villawood snapped up the Waterbird and Newgate housing estates blocks in Tarneit, a couple of suburbs closer to the city than Thornhill Park, for $180m from Central Equity.
Covering 125ha, those parcels can be split into about 2000 plots.
Elsewhere in City of Melton, last December, a local builder spent $7.5m on a 13ha site on Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary at 557-559 Harkness Road, Melton West.
Fourteen months ago, a Riverlee-backed consortium paid Ouson Group nearly $50m for a 61.4ha residential development site in Troupps Road, Mount Cottrell, doubling its presence there.
That vendor in 2018 famously offloaded the nearby 23.5ha former Melton Driving Range at 1-15 Ferris Road, Cobblebank, as a commercial development site for $11.5m – triple what it spent two years before (story continues below).
Wel.Co’s debut project was at Thornhill Park
Wel.Co is directed by Andrew Welsh who has been familiar with Thornhill Park since acquiring a 1000ha block there in 2011 as the firm’s debut project.
At the time – and for six more years until it was formally gazetted – the suburb, about 40km from the city, was known as Rockbank.
That housing estate is proposed for over 3000 dwellings.
Thornhill Park, within one of the country’s fastest growing municipalities, is seeing a wave of infrastructure projects including the recently opened Cobblebank train station, west of Paynes Rd.
Elsewhere there, Wel.Co controls two residential subdivisions at Deanside and another at 125 Alfred Road, Strathtulloh.
Outside of Melton, the builder which was until earlier this year known as Welsh Group, is proposing the Armstrong Creek Town Centre near Geelong.
