A $150 million highrise in West Melbourne has received $70 million in funding from Commonwealth Bank after the developer, United Asia Group, managed to sell 70 percent of the apartments off-the-plan.

Considering all of these sales happened during lockdown, this is a surprising result.
There are two things that I find interesting about this story:

Firstly, that CBA set a 70 percent pre-sale requirement for construction funding. This is a very high requirement, and is indicative of how much the big banks have cut back their lending to apartment developments. In fact, CBA has cut its lending to apartment projects by nearly two-thirds over the last three years.

The second interesting thing is that the developers were actually able to meet this 70 percent presale requirement, in ten months, during a lockdown. The tower has a total of 171 apartments, so to meet this requirement they needed to sell 120 apartments before construction could begin.
UAG has revealed that 30 percent of sales were to first home buyers, another 30 percent were other owner-occupiers, and that 40 percent were investors.

Nicole Chow, UAG’s founder, attributed their sales success to the project’s location, design, and market positioning.

The moral of the story is that, evidently, even when the market is against you, you can still succeed if you make a desirable product.