3 Beach Street, Kwinana Beach is a large industrial site located on the corner of Beach Street and Patterson Road within the Kwinana industrial precinct. The site is approximately 10,862m², or just over 1.08 hectares.

 

Zoning and planning context

The site is zoned General Industry under the local planning scheme, which allows a range of industrial uses including manufacturing, processing, storage, warehousing and associated offices. Some property listings describe the zoning as “Factory, Warehouse and Industrial”, which isn’t a formal planning classification but a way of describing the uses allowed under General Industry zoning.

 

Use as a concrete batching facility

The site was operated as a concrete batching plant, which is an industrial facility where concrete is made before being delivered to construction sites. Rather than mixing concrete by hand on site, batching plants allow it to be produced in a controlled, consistent way and in much larger quantities.

 

Concrete is made from a small number of basic ingredients. A batching plant brings these together in precise amounts so the final product meets engineering and safety standards. The main ingredients are:

• cement

• sand

• crushed rock or gravel, known as aggregate

• water

• sometimes chemical additives that control how fast the concrete sets or how strong it becomes.

 

At a batching plant, each of these materials is carefully measured. This process, known as batching, ensures that every load of concrete is consistent and reliable.

 

How a batching plant operates

Raw materials are delivered to the site and stored in different ways. Cement is usually kept in tall silos, while sand and aggregate are stored in open stockpiles or bins. When a batch of concrete is required, the plant measures out the correct quantities of each ingredient based on a set recipe.

 

The materials are then mixed together. In some plants, the concrete is fully mixed on site before being loaded into trucks. In others, the dry ingredients are loaded into a rotating drum on the truck, with water added either at the plant or shortly after leaving (from a built-in water tank, usually mounted behind the cab or along the chassis).

 

Once loaded, the concrete is transported in agitator trucks, where it keeps rotating so it doesn’t harden before reaching the construction site, as concrete begins to set within a few hours.

 

The Kwinana Beach site

The site was most recently associated with Hanson Construction Materials, which ran concrete batching operations, as confirmed by government environmental records. These records describe typical batching plant infrastructure including storage silos, weigh hoppers, truck wash-down areas, slurry pits and water management systems. Environmental approvals issued for the site also addressed dust, noise and wastewater management, which is typical of an active concrete production facility.

 

Early ownership

Prior to Hanson’s operation of the site, the property was owned by Pioneer Concrete (WA) Pty Ltd, a long-established Western Australian concrete and quarry operator. Pioneer Concrete (WA) was part of Pioneer group, which played a major role in Australia’s construction materials industry throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

 

The 2003 sale

On 3 September 2003, the property was sold in a recorded transfer from Pioneer Concrete (WA) Pty Ltd to an entity listed in property databases as Pioneer Construction Materials Pty Ltd. The transfer shows a considerable amount of $49,076,827, which seems way out of proportion when considering the size of the site but it looks like this figure doesn’t just represent the sale of 3 Beach Street alone.

 

The sale is recorded as being a ‘multi-sale’, which means it applies to a number of assets or properties sold together for this amount. The vendor and purchaser were both Pioneer entities, which shows that the 2003 transaction was an internal restructure rather than an arms-length market sale.

 

Transition to Hanson

In the early 2000s, Pioneer Construction Materials was rebranded as Hanson Construction Materials, a result of Pioneer International being taken over by Hanson in the late 1990s. The Kwinana Beach site continued operating as part of Hanson’s concrete supply network for years after.

 

Sale in 2021

On 4 June 2021, 3 Beach Street, Kwinana Beach was sold for $3,575,000 to Glenvew Pty Ltd and Bensson Pty Ltd, both being Victorian-based companies associated with private trusts.