Be real quick! Will be sold etc.

The Irish soccer legend George Best put it best, I think, when he said, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

Mick Fanning, who won world titles in 2007, 2009 and 2013 before retiring in 2018 after seventeen years on tour, has pissed away his millions on real estate and various business plays, including Balter Beer which sold one year ago for a rumoured two-hundred mill.

Now, Mick, who turns forty in June, is selling one of the three apartment blocks he owns on Boundary Street, Coolangatta, the strip that divides Coolangatta, in Queensland, and Tweed Heads, in NSW, and footsteps from Snapper Rocks’ Supabank.

Mick bought the joint at 213 Boundary Street, Coolangatta, for $3.1 million in 2007 and turned the old red-brick fifties build into something a little easier on potential buyers’ eyes with soothing vanilla interiors, black faucets, wooden flooring and with breeze-block walls enclosing patios.

The agent calls it a “luxurious homestead.”

There are two three-bedroom apartments, each with its own studio or granny flat, two garages, and the building squats on five-thousand square feet. 

The selling agent says y’can rent the big apartments out for eight hundred dollars a week and you’ll get five hundred for the tiny joints underneath ‘em. 

Inspection dates, times, here. 

Be quick.

There’s a fever for real estate on the Gold Coast at the moment, a frenzy bigger than bitcoin or Tesla, with even shitty old houses on streets famous for their cavalcades of human detritus selling for millions. Gonna be sold real quick.

Mick also owns the building next door, which he bought for 2005 for $1.39 million and another two doors down, bought for $1.2 million in 2006. 

"Everybody wants all the investment by government, but as long as it's not in their backyard. It's a real problem…”

The fall-out from Lennox Head’s overwhelming rejection of the WSL can be likened, I think, to a successful small business refusing the buy-out of a corporate monster, an Amazon, an Apple. 

An offer too good to refuse etc.

For some, and particularly on the right side of politics, the belief that there can be something more appealing and important than money, a town wanting to retain a village feel for example, beggars belief. 

When the Ballina Council voted, eight-to-two, against a WSL event at Lennox Head-Sharpes, the state’s deputy mayor, Giovanni “John” Barilaro, said the decision was a classic case of Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome. 

“I think this area is a NIMBY area, sorry to say it,” Mr Barilaro told the ABC. “Everybody wants all the investment by government, but as long as it’s not in their backyard. It’s a real problem…”

Merewether, a lovely and on-the-up beachside suburb of Newcastle where two million Australian dollars barely gets you near the beach, meanwhile, is shouting to the heavens at the joy, and money, the event will bring the joint. 

Newcastle’s Lord Mayor Nuatali Nelmes told the ABC the contest is going to inject, “conservatively” at least fifteen-mill into the city, almost double the eight-mill or so that flows into Torquay each easter. 

The WSL’s Andrew Stark says the Merewether CT will “get a massive audience… We’re seeing audiences of like 10 million live across our linear and digital broadcasts and along with all the post production.”

Not real sure how those figures are arrived at, although the WSL’s Instagram and TikTok numbers are pretty robust.