Developer faced bankruptcy and hacking charges before Trump tower plans

Last Monday, Trump Organisation signed a hotel management and brand licensing agreement with Young’s Queensland-based Altus Property Group for a 91-storey hotel and apartment tower on the Surfers Paradise beachfront.

There is no development application yet, but renders show a gold-tinged building that appears to be nearly 30-storeys taller than the 78-floor Q1 tower nearby. Below gold Trump lettering, the illustration shows a beach club spilling out onto the sand. It ignores the fact that there is a road separating the Trickett Street site from the beach.

The plans include 285 hotel rooms and 272 residential apartments, which Young said would start at $5 million each and would be built and sold in time for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

The man who managed to secure a deal to bring the Trump brand to Australia appeared seemingly out of nowhere. The news arrived in a press release on Monday, jointly signed by Young and the Trump Organisation, claiming the project would bring “the prestige and allure of a world-class luxury brand” to the Gold Coast.

The press release noted Altus Property Group’s “track record in delivering landmark developments across Australia”, but the company’s only documented projects are four land subdivisions in regional Queensland and NSW.

While there is little information online to be found about the director of Altus Property Group, a company that was registered in April 2023, a lengthy self-published blog post on his website detailed the deal that was two decades in the making.

But just days later, Young is no longer working with the public relations firm that distributed the initial announcement and his detailed blog post, in which he boasted about cold-calling Ivanka Trump in 2007, has been deleted.

A post about Young on the Altus Property Group Instagram account, says he was “born and raised in regional Queensland”. But a search of regulatory documents reveals the 60-year-old developer was born in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States.

Young told The Australian Financial Review the claim that he was born in Australia was published in error and has now been removed. He said his family migrated to Yeppoon, Queensland, in 1974, when he was a child.

The Altus website notes its founder has 40 years of experience in “signature developments across four states”, but there is little to be found online about these projects, save for the four subdivisions currently underway.

In his now-deleted blog post, Young wrote that his Gold Coast project would be funded entirely by private investors from Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

Young would not comment further about the funding, but told the Australian Financial Review that in hindsight, “it was an error to say anything at all”.

Bankruptcies and hacking allegations

A look through Young’s history as a company director sheds light on the developer’s past. Since 1987, Young has held director roles at 46 different companies, only 17 of which is he currently a director of.

Among them was a company called Crewlodge Pty Ltd, which Young was a director of at various times in 1997 and 1998, and between 2000 and 2004. Crewlodge Pty Ltd owned The Rose and Crown nightclub on the Gold Coast, which, despite a court battle, was demolished to make way for the Soul apartment tower.

Regulatory documents reveal Young was declared bankrupt in 1991 and again in 2010.

Young said the 1991 instance relates to when he was a co-owner of the Railway Hotel in Yeppoon in 1988. He said he struck a deal to repay the debt and have the bankruptcy annulled, which should have been reflected on the Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s records.

Young self-declared as bankrupt in 2010, which he said was due to the global financial crisis.

Regulatory documents reveal that in 2011, another company Young was the director of, Young Land Corporation, went into liquidation owing $27.8 million to five creditors. The largest debt was $27 million owed to LM Investment Management, a Gold Coast-based fund manager that collapsed in 2013.

Young was “uncontactable” during the process, the liquidator noted, save for an initial discussion where Young advised that the company had no realisable assets and no outstanding employee entitlements. Young disputed being uncontactable and also disputed ASIC’s records, saying he ceased interest in those entities after 2010.

“I was not the director of a company while I was a bankrupt,” Young told the Financial Review. He said he does not owe money to LM Investment Management and said it was “nonsense” that the liquidator included it as unsecured debt.

Hacking allegations

Some years earlier, in 1997, Young was charged over computer hacking allegations, in which it was alleged that $1.76 million was illegally transferred from a bank account during Commonwealth Bank’s testing of a new online banking service. Young’s solicitor at the time said he and the two other men involved were not hackers.

Young told the Australian Financial Review he was never personally involved with computer hacking. He said the case was thrown out “with not only no conviction, but a comment to the prosecution [that] having me charged in the first place was a grievous error”.

Those who know of the developer say most of his work has been in regional areas, which may explain why seasoned Queensland property industry figures had not heard his name before.

He does appear to be relatively well-known in Rockhampton, where he is developing a subdivision called Sienna in Gracemere. Photos posted on Facebook confirm that Young spoke at a property development forum in 2025 hosted by the Rockhampton Regional Council.

A Rockhampton property industry figure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described Young as “gregarious” and someone who could hold his own in development circles.

When asked to detail previous properties he had developed or overseen, Young said it was a long list and some could not be named due to non-disclosure agreements.

“They cover subdivisions, master-planned communities, townhouses, unit complexes and terrace homes,” Young said. He said questions over whether he had experience in building high-rise towers were “not relevant”.

The developer said he had worked hard since 1985 across hospitality and property, and he had many entities as a result. He said Altus was a relatively new vehicle, which he sensed had drawn market scepticism.

“However, I have always been a sole operator, only now having to ‘poke my head above the parapet’, so it’s no surprise most people have never heard of me,” Young said.

‘Pipe dream’: Experts sceptical of plans

Meanwhile, Young’s lofty ambitions have drawn criticism from experts and industry figures, who say a tower of such magnitude would take at least five years to build, or longer, given the drain on labour and materials that the Olympics infrastructure pipeline is about to create.

Dr Lyndall Bryant, research director for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute at the Queensland University of Technology, said it was hard to imagine a project of this scale being built in time for the Olympic Games.

“Sourcing trades on the Gold Coast and in Queensland at the same time as we’re trying to get the trades to build all the infrastructure for the Games is hugely problematic,” she said.

Young has estimated the fit-out costs of the tower would be just shy of $1.5 billion. If that is the case, Bryant said the Gold Coast tower could be Australia’s most expensive build.

A leading figure in the Queensland property industry, speaking on the condition of anonymity, was highly sceptical of the plan, calling it a “pipe dream”. He said it would be “impossible” to find a local building company willing to take on a project of that magnitude and commit to a fixed-price contract.

The industry figure estimated a building of that scale would take six to seven years to complete.

Dr Mark Jones, an honorary professor at the University of Queensland’s school of architecture, design and planning, was also sceptical of plans and said most projects of this scale often do not proceed.

“The challenge will come down to the return on investment and the nature of the investors, and whether they’re in a position to take that level of risk,” Jones said.

From an architectural perspective, Jones said the early designs did not appear to have any consideration for the Queensland climate, unlike the nearby Q1 building, which has a two-layer facade to protect it from the coastal environment.

“The building doesn’t present as a Queensland building … it looks almost like an office building in New York or Chicago,” Jones said.

Competing Change.org petitions have sprung up in recent weeks, including one opposing the development, which at the time of publication had gained more than 93,000 signatures, and one supporting it, with about 3400 names.

Queensland Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie told reporters on Friday he had met Young and advised him to go through the usual process of submitting a development application.