Prominent barrister Stuart Morris QC is selling a controversial Ivanhoe East holding to SHL Development, a Canberra-based apartment builder with billionaire directors reportedly with powerful friends in the Chinese government. Morris, a former Justice of the Supreme Court and president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal between 2003 and 2007, is understood to have achieved a price of about $30 million for the unusual Z-shaped development site of 14 homes, which took 26 years to amalgamate. The offering covers 1.5 hectares and has four street frontages including to Wamba Road, opposite Ivanhoe Park. The southern part of the block snakes around one home. The parcel shares a fence with three more homes and a block of units. In 2006, while at VCAT, which decided on many sensitive suburban apartment developments, Morris proposed replacing the site with a medium-density aged care complex that would have added a new product type to the quiet, leafy area. In that year, Morris also offered the site for sale before withdrawing it. The lawyer declined to comment about the current sales transaction when contacted by Capital Gain. A number of old homes on the site, which aren’t heritage protected, are expected to be razed as part of upcoming redevelopment plans. SHL Development made its first Melbourne purchase in 2015 paying $30 million for a 6320-square-metre Brunswick block at 699 Park Street, opposite Princes Park, then in March unveiled plans to build on it that suburb’s tallest apartment complex (with 13 levels). In 2015 the company paid $64 million for land next door to the new Canberra headquarters of Australia’s domestic spy agency. This property is now being marketed as the Campbell 5 housing estate. Last February SHL Development paid $47 million at auction for the city’s rundown Currong and Allawah flats complex, in Braddon. Last week it lodged an application to replace this site with 329 flats in buildings up to 12 storeys. Morris, whose Ivanhoe East home is about a kilometre away from the development site he is selling, is being represented by Colliers International’s Jeremy Gruzewski and Ted Dwyer.
