Ascendis Group
Data centres, housing, and medical and aged care.
Ascendis Group is an Australian property development company working across regional and metropolitan New South Wales. Reuse is the business, not a policy bolted onto it.
What we do
Every stream starts the same way, with a building that already exists and an honest assessment of what it can become. The three differ in who takes the space at the end.
Primary focus
We convert suitable industrial buildings into data centres, powered efficiently and responsibly. Regional operators, councils, utilities and managed service providers need capacity close to where they work, and the market has not been serving them.
Second stream
We repurpose suitable buildings into housing that revitalises regional communities. The structure, the slab and the services are already there, so the work goes into the parts people actually live in.
Third stream
We convert suitable buildings into medical and aged care facilities. Regional populations are short of both, and the buildings that could host them are often sitting empty in the same towns.
The defining idea
Sustainability is the core story of this business rather than a section at the back of a report. It shapes every site we acquire and every decision we make about it.
The largest single emission in a new building is locked in before anyone switches a light on. Keeping the structure avoids most of it.
Demolition sends a building to landfill so a replacement can be trucked in. Reuse keeps the frame, the slab and the envelope in service.
A standing building shortens the programme. The work becomes fit-out, services and consent rather than groundwork and structure.
Underused assets in regional towns come back into use, and the jobs and services attached to them stay local.
Data centres
Power is the bottleneck in Australian data centre supply, and the very large builds are running into planning and grid constraints. Existing industrial buildings already hold a connection, a hardstand and a roof, which is a head start nobody can build their way to.
A use for a building whose current tenancy is thin, assessed properly before anyone is asked to commit. We screen the site, brief the consultants, run the change of use and bring the demand.
Capacity in the region you actually operate in, specified against your requirement rather than against whatever the building used to be. Latency, data sovereignty and a local hand on site are the reasons people ask.
Send us the address and the supply capacity. We will tell you inside a week whether it screens through.
Tell us about your buildingHow we work
Most sites fail. We would rather find that out in an afternoon than after a consultant has been engaged, so the screening comes before the spending.
Power, structure, height, access, fibre and planning are tested against hard gates. A site that fails one of them is out, and we say so straight away.
We establish who takes the space before the design is fixed, so the building is specified against a real requirement rather than an assumed one.
We brief the planners, engineers and fire consultants, and we can read what comes back. A thin report gets sent back before a council officer ever sees it.
Programme, builder, contract and handover are run by people who have done it at institutional scale. Sequencing and clashes get resolved on paper first.
Common questions
Ascendis Group is an Australian property development company based in Sydney. It converts standing buildings into regional data centres, adaptive-reuse housing, and medical and aged care facilities.
Regional and metropolitan New South Wales.
Available power capacity at the connection point rules out most sites first. Slab loading, clear internal height, plant access, room for heat rejection, and carrier fibre arriving by two separate routes are tested next.
Most of a new building's carbon is spent before anyone switches a light on. Keeping the structure avoids that and shortens the programme to occupancy.
Who we are
Ascendis Group Pty Ltd was founded by David Lai and Roland Machaalani. Between them the business can judge a consultant's work rather than take it on trust.
Roland Machaalani · Director
Registered architect, and founder of UrbanActive, the Sydney consultancy behind the 3D staging plans and construction methodology animations used in tier-one tenders for Multiplex, Richard Crookes, ADCO, AW Edwards, John Holland and Built.
The subject matter is construction methodology. Staging, sequencing, programme, and where the clashes are before anyone is on the ground.
David Lai · Director
Runs DKL Projects, his own project management business in Sydney. Previously project management at Goodman Group, Australia's largest industrial property group.
Covers delivery. Programme, builder, contract and handover, done at institutional scale and applied here.
Contact us
If you own an industrial site, need capacity in a regional centre, or want to talk about an adaptive-reuse project, send us the detail and we will come back to you.
