Nice touch - the CEO of the ODA is the ex-CEO of Lend Lease...

Nice touch - the CEO of the ODA is the ex-CEO of Lend Lease ....


Going for gold: Lend Lease wins $10bn London Olympics deal

Florence Chong
March 05, 2007
LEND Lease has beaten its French competitor Bouygues to win the right to develop the $10 billion London Olympic Village and the Stratford City developments.
London's Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) announced on late last Friday that the Lend Lease-led consortium had been named the preferred bidder for for the pound stg. 4-billion sterling project. As one of two preferred contractors, Lend Lease had been in intense negotiation for several months with the ODA, which is headed by David Higgins, the former chief executive of Lend Lease who was involved with the early development of the Sydney Olympic site at Homebush.
The ODA is responsible for the building and infrastructure work for the 2012 London Olympics and handed the stage one development to another Australian international property group, Frank Lowy's Westfield. The cost of London's 2012 Olympics has doubled to pound stg. 5.1 billion, including pound stg. 3.2 billion for construction of sports venues and pound stg. 1.9 billion to regenerate the area around the Olympic site, but did not include a contingency for overruns or possible sale taxes, Bloomberg reported.

Lend Lease's spokesman Ron Cutler said the company would now enter into a "regeneration agreement" with the British authorities on its plan for the development. Mr Cutler could not indicate how long this round of negotiation would take. However, past experience in such detailed negotiation showed that it could take at least several months to complete.

Mr Cutler said the first phase, costing pound stg. 2 billion, would provide 4200 dwellings on the 73-hectare site in East London. The dwellings would house around 17,000 athletes expected to attend the 2012 London Olympics. There would also be commercial and hotel development on the site.

Mr Cutler said the planning would be completed by 2008 and construction would begin in the following year, to be finished by 2011 or early 2012.

The contract also provided for phase two development of what was known as zones 2 to 7. Work on phase 2 would begin post-Olympics and due for completion in 2020 in a massive urban renewal project, expected to become the catalyst for future regeneration programs in Britain.

Mr Cutler said Lend Lease had two partners in the project. They are First Base, a social housing development company - in which Lend Lease has a 42 per cent stake - and the East Thames Housing Group, an affordable housing specialist. He said the redevelopment would be expected to offer a sizeable component of affordable housing. Currently the bulk of the site was made up of a disused railway marshalling yard, located north of Canary Wharf, also an urban renewal project, which has become a thriving commercial precinct. The final value of the second phase could be pound stg. 3 billion, Mr Butler said.

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