The property pages of Australia’s newspapers and online magazines have been all a-tizz with news that Donald Trump’s son Eric is planning to build the country’s tallest residential tower – or maybe second-tallest – on the Gold Coast.

US President Donald Trump’s company has announced plans for a skyscraper, which according to his son Eric, will be the country’s tallest building.

But, as is common with Trumpian bombast and exaggeration, it will be 50 metres shorter than the 101-storey One Park Lane project on the same stretch of beach.

Like the Trump tower, work on that is also expected to get underway later this year. However, at 335 metres high, the Trump tower will be taller than the Shard in London.

‘Prestige and allure’

The Trump family firm’s first official project in Australia will bring “the prestige and allure of a world-class luxury brand” to the country, Eric Trump said.

The  91-storey Trump International Hotel & Tower is expected to cost at least $1.5 bn and construction is set to begin in August, according to the hotel’s Australian developer, Altus Property Group.

The building will have 285 hotel rooms as well 272 luxury residential apartments. It will also include space for high-end retailers and restaurants, along with an exclusive beach club located along the world-famous beachfront.

The scheme, to be delivered in partnership with Queensland-based Altus Property Group, would represent the Trump Organisation’s first development in Australia.

The project has not yet received development approval from Gold Coast City Council, with a formal development application still to be lodged, but that may not present much of a problem. The Gold Coast Bulletin has reported that Mayor Tom Tate had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago before the $1.5bn deal was signed.

‘He’s very likeable,’ Mr Tate told the Bulletin.

Global Capital

The proposed project reflects a broader trend of global capital targeting the Gold Coast, which has increasingly attracted international developers and investors due to its tourism-led economy, expanding population base, and established high-rise skyline, says the Commercial Real Estate website.

David Young of Altus Property Group signed the deal with Eric Trump, the second son of US President Donald Trump, at the  President’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Valentine’s Day. However, the property developer is a businessman who has gone bankrupt twice in the past, the ABC revealed this week.

Mr Young described the proposal as something “I’ve been pursuing for almost 20 years”, starting with a cold call to Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka in 2007. But the global financial crisis of the late 2000s then produced “setbacks for both the Trumps and my own companies, because property development rides on debt”.

His company’s website also published an article in which Mr Young said one of his former property businesses had, in the GFC washout, “folded, unable to complete projects because credit had dried up [and] this happened to builders all over Australia”.

The ABC article says its searches of federal insolvency records revealed the 60-year-old has also had personal financial scrapes.

In 2010, around the time the property company was in trouble, he declared himself bankrupt in Surfers Paradise with his occupation as a management consultant. He was discharged three years later, the normal period for a bankruptcy, records show.

Bankrupt

Earlier, in 1991 when in Cairns, documents also show he was sent bankrupt along with at least one other person by brewing business Castlemaine Perkins. That bankruptcy was also legally completed.

According to a separate ABC article, Mr Young said apartments in the tower at 3 Trickett Street, Surfers Paradise, were “likely to start at $5 million” and that there were misconceptions about Trump Towers, with other projects being “tasteful and expensive” and “attracting the world’s wealthiest people”.

“The file footage that Australians see, of Trump hotels and resorts with gaudy gold-plated bathroom fixtures, mirrors and heavy chandeliers, is old footage from the 1980s and 90s,” he said. “The modern Trump package is high-end design and fit-outs, with a premium feel.”

The project would follow the same Trump design manual as similar towers being built in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.