NSW Is Getting Australia’s First Surf Lodge
A huge, $72 million ‘surf lodge’ is being built some 35km from the nearest coastline.
By Terry Christodoulou
Thu, Nov 26, 2020 3:31am
2 min
2 min
A huge, $72 million ‘surf lodge’ is being built some 35km from the nearest coastline.
Located 60-minutes from Sydney CBD or 45 minutes by boat from Palm Beach, Wisemans Surf Lodge – in Wisemans Ferry, NSW – will boast a wave pool roughly the size of four football fields powered by US-based wave pool technology, Surfloch. The technology has the ability to generate 2.5-metre waves on the main peak ideal beginner waves on the second peak and everything in between.
As the world’s first surf lodge and Australia’s first resort-style surfing destination, it’s not limited to a luxurious surf experience, with a 9-hole golf course, 54 hotel suites, restaurant, bar, conference facilities also located on the 45-acre grounds.
The scheduled opening comes off the back of other local projects such as UrbnSurf and Aussie Surf Lakes that sees the further commercialisation of the surfing experience.
Co-founder John Du Vernet says, “What we’ll create at Wisemans is a solution to access the types of waves we’d often have to travel overseas for, waves we dream about. We’ve focused on creating a space that thinks about everything beyond the pool, even for the non-surfer, within a resort-like facility in a magical, and somewhat secret part of Sydney.”
Elsewhere, the resort will feature a remodel of a former hotel spearheaded by Sydney’s Kelvin Ho (Akin Atelier), best known for his work across a number of Merivale flagship venues. Ho will bring a nostalgic nod to the Australian surfing culture.
Access to Wisemans Surf Lodge will work on a membership-model, with more information to be revealed in 2021.
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Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires
By CHAVA GOURARIE
Wed, Aug 28, 2024 3 min
3 min
Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.
The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.
That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.
The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.
As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.
The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.
The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.
“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.
While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.
“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”
That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.
While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”
