From ‘too scary’ to booming: How data powered Wollongong’s $1bn property deals
Backed by rigorous analysis and years of dealmaking, Wollongong’s property market has shifted from overlooked to in-demand.
A decade ago, developers thought Wollongong was “too scary”.
Now they are lining up to get in.
At the centre of that transformation is Colliers Wollongong Managing Director, Simon Kersten, who has had a hand in close to $1 billion in deals over the past 10 years, helping reshape the city’s skyline and reputation.
From mega-sites like WIN Grand, being rebranded to Crown Square, to the former Bunnings site at the corner of Gipps and Flinders streets, Kersten has had a hand in some of the Illawarra’s biggest transactions, helping turn Wollongong from a place investors once avoided into one they are now actively chasing.
And according to Kersten, the secret has not been spin, long lunches or sales talk.
It has been data.
“They’re the reasons we write the apartment report every year and the reasons why we’re the only real estate office in the region with a full-time analyst,” he said.
“So that we can give the people we’re advising confidence in what we’re telling them.
“That we’re not just talking out of our hat, that it’s backed with data and with real transactions and some science.”
That approach helped Colliers build something priceless in property: trust.
Kersten said the job is not just selling a site, but proving why it stacks up, what it can become, and why the numbers work.
“It’s about justifying why the investment works, and then mapping out the path to deliver the end product,” he said.
That trust was badly needed in Wollongong 10 years ago, when the city had an image problem.
“There’s not enough history in the market. There’s not enough apartments being built historically for us to feel comfortable in what the trend looks like,” Kersten recalled developers saying.
And then came the bluntest assessment of all:
“Wollongong’s too scary for us.”
At the time, there was widespread talk that the city was heading for an apartment glut.
“There were some reports in the media, and there was a lot of discussion around Wollongong that there were too many cranes in the sky and too many apartments coming, and it was all going to crash,” Kersten said.
But Colliers thought the opposite.
“We decided to put some science around it and put some data around it to disprove that myth.”
What followed was painstaking work.
Before today’s planning tools and cleaner datasets, Kersten said the organisation’s first apartment report in 2019 was built the hard way.
“It was literally driving the streets because we couldn’t access the DA registers on bulk back then,” he said.
“It was sitting with every developer and asking them how many products, when are you going to start building, when are you going to finish building, what do you think you’ll sell them for? It was that manual.”
Those reports have since become one of the market’s key reference points, used not just by agents and developers, but by lenders trying to decide whether to back projects in the region.
“We have a lot of the major regional banks call us in the same way that the developers call us,” Kersten said.
“‘What are your views, what are your thoughts, where do you think it’s going to go, what do you think of this job, what do you think of this price?’”
And the payoff has been enormous.
Where once Colliers had to convince people to even look at Wollongong, there are now genuine queues forming around major development sites.
“When we sold WIN Grand, we had over 100 inquiries,” Kersten said.
“And Bunnings was similar when we sold that site for $40 million.”
That Bunnings site is one of the clearest examples of how dramatically developer thinking has changed.
Kersten said the owners initially wanted to keep using the land for bulky goods retail.
But Colliers pushed a different vision.
“We went to the owners, BWP Trust, and said, ‘Hey, I know what you’re going to do with this site, but you shouldn’t. This is what you should do with it.’”
What followed was a planning exercise that helped unlock the site’s much bigger potential.
“We were able to explain the potential for the site and what it could be used for and should be used for,” Kersten said.
“And since then, the whole planning rules changed - it’s probably five times bigger than even what we dreamt.”
That kind of thinking is now being put to the test - at a time when global instability is once again sending shockwaves through the building industry.
Kersten said builders are already being hit by fresh supplier increases linked to tensions in the Middle East.
“I had a builder in the office this morning who’d had four emails from suppliers today with price increases on various things because of the Middle East,” he said.
He compared it to the price explosion that followed COVID.
“Pre-COVID, we were building high-rise apartments in Wollongong for $4,000 a square metre, sometimes less. Today, that is $8,000 to $10,000 per square metre.”
His warning was blunt: once prices go up, they rarely come back down.
Still, Kersten believes Wollongong is in a strong position to ride it out.
“Everybody has huge faith in Wollongong, and everybody can see the continuation of growth,” he said.
“And also whilst we’re at the point where we’re still cheaper than Sydney, everybody can see room for growth in our prices.”
Kersten said that means prices are likely to keep climbing, and more developments will follow.
“Until we get a 15 to 20 per cent bump in our housing prices, we won’t see a huge acceleration in the delivery of product,” he said.
That means the very thing making buyers nervous — rising prices — may be the same thing needed to make more projects stack up.
For all the billion-dollar dealmaking, Kersten says the work still comes back to getting the fundamentals right.
“We’ve always focused on doing what we do really well — backing our advice with data and delivering for clients — and over time, the rest has taken care of itself.”