Family Legacy to AI Future: George Kambitsis’ SA Development Playbook

George Kambitsis is a staple of the South Australian development scene. In recent years, he’s focused mainly on office towers and multi-storey car parks, but branched into residential work with a subdivision at O’Sullivan Beach south of Adelaide and a $35-million luxury apartment project at North Adelaide. The deliberately spoken director of Kambitsis Group, which operates through Prime Space Projects, says it was the matriarch of his family who started things up 70 years ago. “The Kambitsis Group is a family business that was actually established by my mother before she met my father in the 1950s,” he tells delegates at The Urban Developer ’s inaugural symposium in Adelaide on a June afternoon in a convention room overlooking the River Torrens. “She was a trailblazing woman who became a property developer who bought cottages and rented them. “She was truly a force of nature.” Born in Port Pirie 225km north of Adelaide, Philia Kambitsis OAM died peacefully in December last year at the age of 99. ▲ West’s Coffee Palace on Adelaide’s Hindley Street is among assets in the CBD the Kambitsis Group has been actively involved with. “She started our business and then about seven years later met and married my father [the late Nicholas] who was a merchant marine captain, a ship’s captain, and they formed a partnership in business as well as life,” Kambitsis says. “A woman going into development [in the 1950s], buying and renovating properties, flipping them, moving on to the next, sometimes having two or three or more at a time [was] a remarkable achievement,” Kambitsis says. “I learnt a lot from her as I did from my father.” Choice between adapting or selling At a symposium in a heritage-rich metropolis where adaptive reuse is high on the agenda , Kambitsis says his firm recently undertook adaptive reuse of its own. “We took two existing office buildings that were legacy assets that my family developed nearly 40 years ago that were ageing and needed to either be repositioned or sold,” he says of the former Internode and iiNet buildings on Grenfell Street where SA’s largest membership group RAA recently became the anchor tenant. “We decided to reposition and ... we took two adjacent office buildings and turned them into one office building. “And in so doing, we stripped everything but the slabs and columns, we added a floor, we demolished 50 walls and ultimately we developed a seven-level building that created 9500sq m of [floor] area.” ▲ A rendering of RAA City where Kambitsis says Prime Space Projects made a virtue out of a vice. RAA moved into its new digs, which it calls RAA City, on June 15. The building now also houses a café called 1903 that opened this week and heritage displays celebrating the organisation’s 120-year history. Kambitsis says that because he kept the slabs and columns, he felt the market might perceive the project more as a refurbishment than a new build. “I say it’s as good as a new build, but what we tried to do was make a virtue from that vice that the market was perceiving and we pursued the highest environmental outcomes that we could,” he says. “And I’m proud to say that we have achieved a six-star green rating.” Kambitsis says there was a 9000-tonne reduction in embodied carbon compared to what a new building would have produced. “We then bought carbon credits ... becoming the first up-front carbon neutral office building in South Australia,” he says. “The result of all those efforts was that when we were marketing to corporates, large tenants, that really kicked off the development and in the end leased the whole of the building to the RAA as their new city headquarters. “And we knocked back other large corporates ... only because we should have built a bigger building.” Big leap of faith pays off Kambitsis says it was a big leap of faith to embark on the project with no pre-commitment, but that Prime Space Projects was rewarded when premium tenants “bought the vision”. “Doing good is good business as well,” he says. “I think [the Adelaide] office market, like every mature office market around the country, has got B and C grade buildings that are never going to be leased at an economic rate without adaptive reuse or not even adaptive but some love provided to them.” He says Prime Space Projects is not new to energy efficient developments. “We developed what I argue [... was ...] the first five-star, as-designed, green-star building in South Australia in 2006,” he says. “And we followed that with one of the first five-star as-built buildings in the Santos building that we completed in 2007. “So that’s certainly a trend that we picked up early, but also evolved with it.” Kambitsis says he is now looking at health and well-being through a worldwide ratings system and with RAA City is going for the maximum platinum rating. ▲ George Kambitsis speaks with The Urban Developer chief executive Adam Di Marco at the company’s inaugural symposium in Adelaide. Taking his 1950s-founded business toward 2050, he says artificial intelligence could “help in ways that I haven’t worked out yet”. “So, for example, we are running some numbers on an office building in Melbourne ... and ... it’s a multi-tenanted building with a lot of smaller tenants and we’re running through Claude ... a deep dive into the viability of the business, the growth prospects of it, ... the likelihood of renewal or expansion of their premises within that building,” he says. “Now, it’s fantastic if it’s accurate, who knows, but it’s the sort of technology and lateral thinking that I reckon AI can lead toward some fantastic outcomes in this industry, like every other.” He says that “in a peculiar manner” AI is likely to see more micro and small businesses rise that could be the commercial tenants of the future. “I just think there’s a whole world of people out there who are going to grab AI with both hands and create businesses and ... many of them will ... want office space that responds to the needs of their staff ... and there’s an opportunity there [for] super high quality boutique scale office [space],” he says. Kambitsis says he likes being a developer despite “mind-melting delays” at times in the approvals process. “I do get great satisfaction, having monuments created, buildings that are designed,” he says. In terms of a succession plan into the third generation of his family business, he says he has “two wonderful children”, a daughter (19) and a son (16). “Well, I am hopeful, but they want to hurry up because I don’t want to do this forever,” he says.

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Chris Thomson
Thu 25 Jun 26

Family Legacy to AI Future: George Kambitsis’ SA Development Playbook

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