When Bob Williams gazes across the Perth city skyline to the CBD’s western-most high rise building he is clearly still enthralled with the structure that marks the high and low point for his construction career.
When Bob Williams gazes across the Perth city skyline to the CBD’s western-most high rise building he is clearly still enthralled with the structure that marks the high and low point for his construction career.
QV1 stands as a monument to Mr Williams’ vision to bring the best of building design to Western Australia, but it also marks the demise of his construction company Interstruct which collapsed near the end of the development in 1991.
His fondness for the Harry Seidler-designed high rise belies the tortuous path from concept to completion which absorbed years of his business life and left the business he had spent two decades building in tatters.
From the cobbling together of the properties which form the site, to obtaining the finance, battling unions during construction and finding tenants, there is little about the QV1 story that makes it sound like an easy undertaking.
Mr Williams said he had originally obtained the right to develop two houses owned by the University of Western Australia but that proposed hotel fell through in the early 1980s. Instead of walking away he steadily acquired more adjacent land, eventually creating a 17,000 square metre development site.
As an entrepreneurial builder he said he wanted to get into major office construction but struggled to do so due to the market’s domination by then privately-owned Multiplex.
“I always wanted to build a high rise building but in Perth (Multiplex founder) John Roberts had a mortgage on that,” Mr Williams recalls.
“He had done a deal with the unions that allowed him to promise clients a definite finishing date.
“The only way I could, as a builder, build a high rise CBD building was to develop one myself.”
Mr Williams said in theory there was demand for his project but, as he subsequently learned, that part of the equation could not easily be taken for granted in a small town where 65,000sqm of lettable space made a mark.
“The hazard with a big building and that industry is it takes about two and half years to build and two years to organise funding and permits,” he said.
“It is a four-and-half- to five-year gestation period before it opens.
“When you start out the world economy is in a certain shape, the Japanese economy was booming, Japanese companies and banks were striding the world investing in property.”
Mr Williams not only had to contend with Japan’s fall as the star economy of the world, but also with WA’s own entrepreneurs and their mates in state government which made life all the more difficult.
First he discovered rival buildings were underway. Mr Williams notes QV1’s chief competition was Central Park which was a deal stitched together by merchant banker and WA Inc figure Laurie Connell and the State Government Insurance Organisation which ultimately cost the state $100 million. At the same time Alan Bond built the tower which now houses Bankwest.
In addition, his partner in the development, Barrack House, failed to raise the funding, leaving QV1 reliant on a put option agreed with BT and the State Superannuation Fund of NSW.
That initial funding failure, Mr Williams claims, delayed the project by 12 months, pushing the completion back to a time when Perth’s property market had changed significantly.
“That is the adventure of being a big developer,” he said.
“It is sailing into the unknown and hoping like hell the weather will be fair.”
It also lost time due to difficulties with unions on site, including a strike because art on the hoardings depicted a worker with a hammer – the artist having unwittingly broken a line of demarcation that prevented carpenters doing labourers’ work.
“The unions were hellbent on sending us broke,” Mr Williams recalls.
“That has always puzzled me, we were a large employer of men, we trained a lot of apprentices and building supervisors and foremen and project managers.
“It is the mentality of those people.”
The last big issue was the leasing market which collapsed in the early 1990s as recession hit. QV1 had one pre-signed anchor tenant, law firm Parker & Parker, which withdrew. The building took years to fully let.
Ultimately, though it was not just the CBD building market alone which hit Interstruct.
It was also a founding partner in the Port Geographe property development near Busselton which failed after Japanese partners withdrew due to difficulties in raising promised funds.
Mr Williams remembers his Japanese partners, caught by their own economic dramas, had sought to get out of the deal and a clause requiring acceptance of the deal under Australia’s foreign investment rules was their only hope of doing so.
With just a day until the deadline in the clause, he received notice that the federal government had turned down Japanese investment in the project on environmental grounds. Two days later, after the deadline had passed, he received another letter from the federal government advising him they had made a mistake and the investment was allowed.
Mr Williams blames his lawyers in the deal who failed to draft him a succinct two-page agreement as requested.
“A lesson I learned in business and in my life, in any activity, is you can’t afford to subcontract out responsibility to others,” he said.
“You can’t rely on others to do things that are critical to your business.
“You have to be on top of everything.”
In many ways, Mr Williams is disappointed that his time in business and what he learned is now so inaccessible to others. Apart from his days as a construction entrepreneur, he has an extensive history consulting on projects in many places having left WA after the collapse of his business to live in places like Vietnam and Oman – a period he remembers fondly.
“There are people like me in society that have this enormous bank of experience that is not called upon.
“There are people sitting around hibernating, vegetating and decaying with their immense store of knowledge.
“How else can you get knowledge without experience? You can do as many university courses as you like but until you are at the coalface you have not learned anything.”
While Mr Williams was never one of the infamous WA Inc, four-on-the-floor entrepreneurs that cost WA a great deal in both money and reputation he admits that it was easy to be distracted from core business in those heady times.
For instance was he one of many businessmen who were absorbed in the expensive practice of racing maxi yachts, competing personally, and as a team, in several Sydney-to-Hobarts and the UK’s famous Fastnet race via his well-known boat Freight Train.
He also recalls being lured into sponsoring the Perth Wildcats basketball team which he ended up owning after it fell into financial difficulty. The team was eventually sold to Kerry Stokes.
Mr Williams contrasts his dabbling in these pursuits with others that have a more purist approach to business. He suggests that is a more successful tack, citing Len Buckeridge as an example.
“Look at Len. Does Len own a vineyard or yachts or sporting teams? Len sticks to his guns,” he said.
“If you look at success stories they just stick to what they do.
“If I had to give anyone advice I would say that: stick to what you do, concentrate on that.”
Mr Williams has now returned to Australia and his current project is a not-for-profit yachting event backed by the state government called Ocean Race Around Australia which is linked to the Variety children’s charity.
Remaining a keen yachtsman, he envisages a race which has fleets of boats starting from key ports and circumnavigating Australia.
