"It was really exciting to catch 150 waves in four hours. That was out of this world."
Four years back, three-time world surf champ Mick Fanning, whose real estate, beer and wellness investments can be counted in the tens of millions, threw his name and and an undisclosed investment into a $300 mill wave pool and golf resort on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the biggest tourism development on that wildly developed strip in over forty years.
Developers are gonna turn the old Parkwood Village into the The Palm Valley Gold Coast Resort, dressing the landscape in an upgraded 18-hole golf course, a brewery, two hundred apartments, a chapel for those with an inclination to piety, and a wave pool featuring Endless Surf tech, the same tank that just opened in Munich.
The development is at the far northern end of the Gold Coast in the otherwise dreary suburb of Parkwood, back off the ocean and inland from down-at-heel Labrador, which is also the home of Peter Drouyn.
The three-hundred mill build is now gonna cost four-hundred mill and a couple of the eight-storey towers are gonna be iced and turned into fifty-eight villas and the first hunk of dirt is going to be tossed in July.
The managing director is the former golf pro Luke Altschwager.
Mick Fanning, said he was made an offer too good to refuse, as they say, by Altschwager, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the other Australian wave pool developer Andrew Ross.
As far as the Endless Surf tech, Fanning describes it as the best in the biz, something your ol pal DR has been told by industry insiders.
“The [tech] is probably the most user-friendly and that it just doesn’t stop it, just wave after wave,” says Mick. “It was really exciting to catch 150 waves in four hours. That was out of this world. Surfers will travel anywhere to catch a wave. We jump on boats, we chart tiny, dodgy planes and sleep in the dirt just to get a good wave.”