A messy stoush between luxury beachfront unit owners and the developer of an adjacent high-rise site is playing out in Queensland’s Supreme Court.
The drama centres on apartment complex Oceana on Broadbeach, home to 98 beachfront apartments overlooking the the sand and surf just north of thr Broadbeach surf club.
Next door, developers 21 Broadbeach Blvd Pty Ltd and builder GlenQ Pty Ltd started work on a towering 20-storey apartment building but according to Oceana, they haven’t complied with by the rules.
Oceana’s body corporate accuses the developer of barging onto their land: knocking down fences, tearing up soil, damaging underground services and driving massive piling rigs over the boundary. It raced to the Supreme Court and won an urgent injunction to shut down the alleged trespass.
A temporary truce was struck the following month. Both sides signed a licence agreement allowing limited work to continue — provided the developer fixed the damage and stuck to strict conditions. Case closed? Not quite.
By March 2025, the truce was shattered. Oceana was back in court claiming the developer had broken the deal and continued to trespass on their land. They wanted more injunctions and damages. But this time, the fight didn’t even get to the messy building works. Instead, it descended into a legal chess game about who had the right to sue.
The developer launched a bold counterattack: Oceana, they claimed, hadn’t properly authorised its legal action in the first place. It contended that the lawsuit required authorisation by the owners by a special resolution of a general meeting, rather than the consent of the body corporate committee.
Oceana pointed to a vote held at its November 2024 annual meeting. The numbers were solid: 30 votes for, just two against. But the meeting minutes mistakenly labelled the vote as an “ordinary resolution”, an error that the developer latched onto.
Oceana sought intervention from the body corporate Commissioner who declared the resolution valid, declaring the mislabelling to be of no significance since the vote achieved the 75% threshold required for special resolutions.
With the strike-out hearing looming, Oceana then called another special meeting in April 2025 to officially ratify the lawsuit.
That resulted in an even bigger majority in support. But once again, process tripped them up — this time because they skipped the full 21 days of notice legally required before calling such a meeting. The developer pounced again, arguing that the shortcut meant the latest vote was invalid too.
When the matter came before Chief Justice Helen Bowskill in the Supreme Court in Brisbane, she agreed the absence of a 21 notice period for the general meeting that passed the further resolution meant it iregular.
She stayed the action to allow Oceana to pass a further resolution at a properly constituted general meeting with proper notice given to every unit owner.
The neighbours’ war continues, with the beachfront battle paused — but far from over.
