From chicken shops to $1b empire: Makris on his $500m Gold Coast bet

27/05/2026

Australian Financial Review

Greek-Australian Con Makris started his billion-dollar business running takeaways. Now he’s giving the Marina Mirage site a much-anticipated glow-up. From the upcoming Rich List issue, out on May 29.

Before he sits down for our interview, Greek-Australian property mogul Con Makris looks me in the eye and – as if starring in the trailer for his own biopic – tells me his story is unbelievable. “You won’t believe it. I don’t believe it,” he says.

Barely a minute passes before Makris launches into perhaps his most incredible story of all: a life-changing, spiritual encounter. It was in a small village in Mykonos during a visit to Greece in the 1980s that Makris and wife Carol came across a young boy with cerebral palsy struggling to walk. Makris resolved to pay for the boy’s treatment. After a visit to the holy island of Tinos, he returned to Mykonos to seek him out and was unexpectedly guided by a veiled woman who had such a strong spirituality that Makris felt he was in the presence of the Virgin Mary, willing him to help the child.

He’s never before shared this story publicly. But he tells it now as a way to explain the blessed life he believes he has led since his humble beginnings running a chain of chicken shops in Adelaide. He made his Financial Review Rich List  debut in 2003 with an estimated wealth of $285 million.

This year, the now 79-year-old comes in at 176th place with a net worth of $1.03 billion. He is yet another example of the enduring power of property to build the fortunes of Australia’s wealthiest, and his billionaire status is a testament to his ability to understand, and time, the market.

More than a decade has passed since Makris last sat down for an in-depth interview. However, his latest project, a $500 million development on the Gold Coast – and some nudging from his son and daughter-in-law who now run the family business – has prompted the billionaire to reflect on his own, perhaps divinely guided, success.

Makris arrives in the boardroom for our interview wearing a forest-green blazer, adorned with a pocket square, and clutching a walking cane with a gold lion’s head atop it. The attire fits with the setting, inside a display suite for the developer’s latest luxury project, but perhaps not the 30-degree- plus Gold Coast weather.

A wall-mounted television is rotating through flashy artist impressions, displaying the Makris Group’s ambitious redevelopment of the Marina Mirage. The once-thriving shopping centre will be demolished to make way for a 126-room luxury resort which will operate under the Marriott banner, plus 38 private residences with a starting price tag of $6.5 million.

Makris first laid eyes on Marina Mirage in the late 1980s, not long after Christopher Skase built it to complement his Sheraton Resort across the road. True to Skase’s penchant for a lavish party, he opened Marina Mirage with a 700-guest weekend-long event, organised by his wife, Pixie, who flew in eight chefs for the occasion.

Among the celebrities was AFL hero Warwick Capper, dressed courtesy of Marina Mirage’s new Versace boutique. Skase, who at one point owned the Seven Network, was credited with redefining luxury tourism on the Gold Coast. But then his Qintex media empire collapsed owing $1.5 billion. In 1991, he and Pixie fled to Spain and took refuge in a hillside Majorca villa, an oxygen mask never far away as successive Australian governments attempted and failed to extradite him until his death in 2001.

The Gold Coast was in the midst of a boom when Makris, on a visit from Adelaide, first saw Marina Mirage’s signature white rooftop sails and resolved one day to call the development his own. He and his family had grown fond of the Gold Coast, holidaying there regularly and at one point owning a boat that was moored at The Spit. “I loved it. I’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s a credit to Skase ... Even today it’s magnificent, but it’s rusty,” Makris says of the soon-to-be-demolished centre.

The property had changed hands a few times before Makris eventually snapped it up from receivers in 2013 for $52 million. He later spent about $7 million buying the nearby 78-berth marina. The purchase marked the beginning of a new direction for Makris who, since arriving in Australia at the age of 16, had been amassing a portfolio of large shopping centres, primarily in South Australia. Though before property, Makris was in the business of rotisserie chicken 

Born and raised in Greece, Makris was sent to Australia by his father in 1963 to avoid compulsory military service and arrived in Adelaide, where his sister was already living. Accustomed to hard work (he started working at the age of 12 to support his family), he landed a job at a steel foundry, working 14-hour days, seven days a week. By 1967, at the age of 20, he had saved enough money to buy a fish and chip shop in Burnside, on the eastern outskirts of Adelaide’s CBD, followed by a supermarket and fruit shop next door. It was his first foray into business ownership and he says he worked from 5am to 10pm each day.

The returns he was making weren’t great. But by the late 1970s he caught a scent; demand was growing for rotisserie chicken. Makris opened his first takeaway chicken shop in Hamilton, Victoria. At its peak, his chicken shop empire had seven outlets across Victoria and South Australia. “We’d close the shop about nine o’clock in the night; nobody would leave ’til about 10. We’d have to wash everything,” Makris says. “After four years, if you saw the rotisseries, they were like brand-new.”

A clean kitchen and the freshest ingredients were the key to the best chickens. Even the stuffing inside the bird was so good you could eat it alone. “My chickens were coming out fantastic,” Makris says, while insisting if he were to try, he could still make a good roast chook.

Once each shop was successful, he would sell the business and retain the real estate, earning income from the rent. But once the 1980s arrived,

Makris noticed the major supermarkets were also starting to sell rotisserie chickens, and his business sense told him things were about to change.

Leaning on his instincts, he sold the properties and turned his attention to large-format shopping centres. By the late 1980s, Makris had amassed a collection of shopping centres across South Australia, buying undervalued, ageing assets that he set about revamping, living by the notion that “you’ve got to spend money to make money”.

It was around this time, be it by chance or providence, that he met Keith Williams. A key figure of the Gold Coast’s so-called “white shoe brigade of property developers, Williams was the force behind the new resort and airport at Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays as well as the Sea World Resort, just up the road from Marina Mirage.

At one point he owned the land on which Skase’s Sheraton Mirage resort was eventually built. Williams was a regular at Marina Mirage’s top restaurants and invited Makris on several occasions for coffee or lunch aboard his luxury boat, where a private chef would dish up anything they requested.

Makris describes Williams as a father figure who reinforced to him that ethics and morals were essential to maintaining a good reputation. “He said to me that when you have a good name, banks will help you, anybody will help you,” he says. That may not have been enough to always save Williams – when Queensland’s tourism boom collapsed in the early 1990s, he was forced to offload Hamilton Island; Bob Oatley bought it in 2003. But that advice left a mark on Makris.

The semi-retired billionaire is speaking with AFR Magazine over a macchiato, the day after his . Among the high-profile attendees were Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate and wife Ruth – possibly looking at one of those luxury apartments for themselves. Also fronting up to the marble-lined display suite was local MP, and now state Education Minister, John-Paul Langbroek. Makris knows how to gather a crowd.

He says a key to his success has been choosing who to surround himself with. “My secret was, I will never sit down and have a coffee with a person that was not successful.” Otherwise, says Makris, “you learn nothing”. The relationships he built with his shopping centre tenants were equally important.

Makris says at times he discounted rent or devised business plans for struggling tenants on the brink of collapse. “I was there to help my tenants to survive because then they were my partners. I used to have tenants that would come to me and open not one shop, but three or four in different shopping centres because I looked after them.”

Relationships are one part of the equation, but Makris isn’t shy about how well he knows the market. In the late 1990s, a real estate agent called to gauge his interest in buying Sydney’s Minto Mall. The agent had a buyer willing to pay $34 million, but offered it to Makris if he topped it by $200,000. Makris ran his own numbers on the property, valuing it at just shy of $25 million.

“I said, mate, sell it to him ... [but you] should be taking this guy to the Greek Islands as a present because he’s doing you the biggest favour,” he says. “Within two years, that shopping centre will have at least 20 empty shops and another probably 20 on a monthly tenancy.” The property sold for the top price and, as Makris tells it, was back on the market about a year later with 22 empty shops and about 25 on monthly rental agreements.

He hesitates to divulge much about how he values properties, but is open about his strong distrust for valuers and says he does a better job by assessing each shop on its own merit. A chemist must be looked at differently to a deli or clothing store, he explains.

One suspects, in crunching the numbers, that his willingness to put in long hours, honed from that first job in the steel factory, put him in good stead. During the 1990 recession, Makris owned five shopping centres and says all were fully leased. “I didn’t have one empty shop,” he says. “I can put my hand on the Bible, I didn’t have one empty shop, and I survived with 17 per cent interest.”

By the 2000s, Makris had built up his portfolio of shopping centres in Adelaide and Sydney. But after spending years trying and failing to get a development over the line at the controversial Le Cornu site in North Adelaide, he got fed up with Adelaide City Council and relocated his office to the Gold Coast in 2016. He says it was one of the best decisions he has made in his life.

“I was so happy to come up here because in Adelaide, there is the tall poppy syndrome,” Makris says. For him, it was a departure from the small- mindedness he was beginning to experience in Adelaide, where there was a sentiment from some to “stop Makris making more money”. He began selling off his shopping centres in Adelaide and, today, the group retains just a handful of assets he considers to be “the best”.

He wasn’t always enamoured with the prospect of doing business up north. In 2003, he told the Financial Review that “Queensland is a market that I never liked ..I think there’s a shopping centre for every person who lives in Queensland.” By 2016 he’d changed his tune, saying Queensland was where “the big money” would be made.

And you’ve got to spend money to make it. Before the Marina Mirage launch event, a small group of journalists boarded a private yacht, borrowed from a friend of the Makris family, for a leisurely cruise past Marina Mirage while canapes and Pol Roger champagne were served. The lunchtime soiree was hosted by Makris’ youngest son, Jason, and his wife Natalie, who are leading the resort’s development and taking the family business into its next chapter.

Questions about Makris’ four children are the only ones off the table during our conversation. Each has been involved in the family business to some degree at varying times, and there are multiple news reports detailing the disputes he has had with some of them over the years. A gentle probing of the topic is quickly dismissed, as Makris steers the conversation to Jason and Natalie. The company’s future is brighter, having the pair in the fold, the patriarch says after a stint working for real estate firm JLL and later owning hospitality businesses, Jason joined the family business in 2012. Makris says his son’s growth to become the group’s chief executive is “unbelievable” – one of his favourite words – but he is even more gushing of Natalie, the group’s general manager, who joined Makris Group in 2021. “Natalie sometimes impressed me so much, I think she’s becoming better than me,” Makris says. To this, the equally gushing Natalie simply replies: “There’ll never be another Con Makris.”

There is deep sincerity in Makris’ voice when he again remarks of his disbelief about his life, as though he can’t quite fathom how a young Greek migrant became the success story he is today. He suggests a book about his journey isn’t off the cards, nor is a movie. And if there are any screenwriters reading, let it be known that he did indeed bring that young boy with cerebral palsy along with his mother from Greece to Adelaide. They lived with the Makris family throughout the boy’s treatment. “From that moment onwards, everything I have done in my life I have felt was protected,” he says.

Every couple of days, while having a coffee with Carol at home, he flicks through the pages of a hardcover promotional book about the Marina Mirage project. “I’m so amazed with this development,” he says. The couple plan to purchase one of its 38 luxury apartments, and spend winters on the Gold Coast.

Makris once again speaks of how unbelievable the development plans are: the riviera-inspired resort will include restaurants and a rooftop bar, all with waterfront views. Those white rooftop sails will be reimagined and there will be a small collection of high-end shops, a subtle nod to the site’s origin and those heady days of the 1980s.

Makris credits his family for the redevelopment, which he says will put five-star service above everything else. But it was his business instincts that led him to the Marina Mirage all those decades ago, and which will lead the Makris Group into its future. “I said to my family, now there’s no shopping centres to buy,” Makris says. Destinations, he says, are where people are going, and where there is money to be made.