Maha Sinnathamby and Bob Sharpless: The Friends Who Built a City

“The road to success is paved with stone. Walk with steel boots. Let the stone suffer.” And with that, Maha Sinnathamby—one half of arguably the most successful odd couple of Australia’s development industry—summed up the resolve needed to create the nation’s only privately developed city. Greater Springfield, about 30km south-west of Brisbane, by every conventional measure, should never have existed. It was—admitted Bob Sharpless, the other half of the decades-long venture—“a big hairy, audacious goal… on shit land”. At Urbanity-26, the flagship annual conference of The Urban Developer held on the Gold Coast, Sinnathamby and Sharpless were this year’s recipients of the Lachlan Webb Lifetime Achievement Award. “The vibe of this audience… is just energising to me,” Sharpless told the capacity audience of 950 people at The Urban Developer Awards for Industry Excellence gala dinner, held in conjunction with Urbanity-26. “Maha and I were down in Canberra a few weeks ago, receiving an award in a room full of people who were dull. There were a lot of politicians. The lights were not on. “But when I look at this room, it gives me hope, actually, that the next generation of people in this industry have got the energy levels and the enthusiasm and the skill sets to do so much more. It makes me proud.” Earlier in the day, the development duo spoke at the event’s CityShaper 2026 conversation with The Urban Developer founder and chief executive Adam Di Marco. ▲ Thirty-five years of having a crack: Begun in the 1990s, Springfield will eventually be home to more than 150,000 people. The inspiring story they told of their extraordinary partnership and vision is one that may never unfold again. But let’s hope it does. “It’s been a long journey, you know, 35 years of having a crack,” Sharpless said. “And along the way we’ve dealt with just about everything I think you can have thrown at you—but we’re still here.” Four decades ago, few in Australian property would have bet on a rocky, infrastructure‑starved, 3000ha holding on Brisbane’s western fringe. Fewer still would have believed that an immigrant engineer with “no money” and his understated business partner from Perth could turn it into a thriving city. Now home to betwen 50,000 to 60,000 residents, Springfield is on a trajectory to almost 150,000 people at full build‑out—underpinned by a long-term employment target of one job for every three residents. Big, big hairy audacious goal Sinnathamby and Sharpless both studied civil engineering in Perth, where they met and joined forces in the mid-1980s before moving to Brisbane to pursue their property development dreams. “I wanted to learn property development,” Sharpless said. “You couldn’t in those days learn it in a university, or you couldn’t learn it other than by going out and doing it. “And it’s certainly the case that by joining Maha, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship, responsible risk taking and taking on a big, big hairy audacious goal.” Just a few years after they made the move to Queensland, Sinnathamby saw a newspaper ad for the 3000ha of land with “not much else around it” that set the city-shaping course for the duo. “It was a terrible place and nobody wanted it,” Sinnathamby said. “But something said to me that if we lock this land up and turn it around I could do something with this.” Sharpless added: “It was shit land. It was not flat. It had no infrastructure, and the reputation of that part of South-East Queensland was terrible. No one wanted to live there. So, we had to change all of that.” At the same time, Sinnathamby was closely watching the rise of masterplanned cities in the US and UK, reading global trends against an unsellable local asset. That combination—distressed land close to a capital city, emerging urban models offshore and a migrant’s urgency to “contribute to the fabric of the nation”—crystallised into a singular ambition: build a new city from scratch. The site acquisition structure reflected both opportunity and constraint. The vendor, Australian Forest Holdings, wanted cash; the Springfield group had none. After six months of negotiation, the parties struck a vendor-finance style development rights deal under which Sinnathamby and Sharpless held the right to develop the land and paid it down progressively as lots were sold—effectively securitising future urbanisation in lieu of upfront capital. A true turning point Securing the land was only the prelude. The real turning point—and what makes Springfield systemically important for other large-scale projects—was the political architecture around its approval. Queensland’s then planning minister made it clear that the existing planning framework was inadequate: to realise Springfield, government would have to create new validating legislation, run an Act of Parliament, and effectively give the project its own statutory footing—something last done when Canberra was planned and established more than 70 years earlier. “The masterplan went to Parliament… all the 89 hands went up and unanimously supported it for the first time in the history of this country,” Sinnathamby said. That did more than de‑risk statutory planning. It sent a powerful signal to markets, infrastructure agencies and capital—enabling Springfield City Group to negotiate on highways, rail, universities and hospitals. ▲ Bob Sharpless during his and Maha Sinnathamby’s CityShaper 2026 conversation with The Urban Developer’s Adam Di Marco. But from the perspective of Sharpless, key to the venture’s success was Springfield’s decision to treat major transport infrastructure as a core development lever, starting with the extension to the Centenary Highway. They had been told that significant development rights would only follow if the consortium solved the corridor’s infrastructure burden. Choosing to do so changed everything—re-positioning the land, collapsing travel times and re‑rating the corridor in the eyes of buyers and institutional partners. In parallel, the team invested heavily in “making the land pretty”—with lakes, parks, landscaping and the Brookwater Golf Course to shift subjective perceptions of the location. Mutual respect, complementary skill sets At the heart of the Springfield experiment, however, is one of the industry’s most durable and unlikely partnerships. Sinnathamby, who arrived in Australia as a 17‑year‑old student from Malaysia, frames his life around education, faith and national contribution. Sharpless is the classically trained engineer‑turned‑developer who jokes about chasing his first million, loves AFL, doesn’t mind a drink and still drives a 2009 Mercedes with more than 300,000km on the clock. “We had a clear understanding that we were partners for life. Bob knew who I was, and I knew who he was… Bob and I had a mutual respect and complementary skill sets. We just worked together,” Sinnathamby said. Sharpless calls them “joined at the hip… we either both succeed together, or we both fail together”—and although admitting there have been moments “when I could have throttled him” he has nothing but admiration for Sinnathamby. “If you think about going to another country as someone who doesn’t look like the majority of people, and you come with nothing, and you have to convince the locals to back you to achieve something that’s pretty bloody hard. How easy do you reckon it’d be… with no cultural alignment at all? “I’m very loyal to Maha, and Maha’s been very loyal to me, so it’s worked well. He’s been a wonderful mentor and I’ve learned so much. I would not have been able to do it without someone like that.” ▲ Springfield’s ‘superpower’: Bob Sharpless and wife Belinda, and Maha Sinnathamby and wife Yoga. As well, their families—and particularly their wives—were, in Sharpless’ words, Springfield’s “superpower”: backing them through insolvency scares, repeated moments of being “all in” and the psychological toll of being perpetually leveraged against a decades-long dream. While many masterplanned communities tout lifestyle, Springfield’s operating thesis has always been macroeconomic: a city built on three pillars—education, health and technology. “I believe failure of education is the collapse of a nation,” Sinnathamby said. “We have not wavered on these [pillars] in 30 years.” Meanwhile, on the residential front Springfield is now pivoting from detached housing into high‑density apartments—with about 23,000 units approved in its CBD core. Be careful what you wish for... But although Springfield has created a playbook for large‑scale city‑shaping masterplanned opportunities, the half-joking advice from Sharpless is: “Be careful what you wish for, it’s a life of pain. “Now, there’s a sadness in me that thinks that you probably couldn’t do it now,” he said. “The system is so overgoverned… and it’s just so much harder.” Whereas at the time the vision for Springfield was conceived, he said: “The view of government was ‘Look, if you’re stupid enough and crazy enough to risk your own money—as long as there’s no risk to us, we’ll give you the opportunity to do it’.” “These days it just doesn’t seem to be like that. “So, I don’t know who would, to be honest, be crazy enough to want to take something like this on. “But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that if you’ve got an itch, you’ve got to scratch it… and if there are people out there who want to go and build a city, by all means give it a go. ▲ The first house-and-land package at Springfield was sold in May of 1993. The city is now home to about 60,000 people. “You know, I always thought we were going to go broke. I had planned to go broke. The history of these projects is that the first developer goes broke. So, yeah, we weren’t naive and stupid… we actually planned for the worst and then hoped that that wouldn’t happen. “But I never want to stop people aspiring to do things—because that’s the life of an entrepreneur, and I think persistence will always win out in the end. Maha taught me that.” As for Sinnathamby, he has ensured the stone of Springfield will keep suffering under steel boots for years to come. “I hope all Australians feel proud of it,” he said in his acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement recognition at The Urban Developer Awards for Industry Excellence. “The masterplanned city is the work of many, many, many of you—a unifying force for growth, change, and advancement. “We need the change and continuous advancement, a legacy I hope will endure for generations. “As the famous words of our unofficial [national] anthem reminds us, ‘I am, you are, we are all Australians’. These words have never mattered more than they do today.”

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Phil Bartsch
Mon 27 Jul 26

Maha Sinnathamby and Bob Sharpless: The Friends Who Built a City

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