t took patience, a passion for property and a lot of petrol-pumping for Melbourne entrepreneur Nick Andrianakos to rise to the Financial Review Rich List.
Nick Andrianakos used to drive a forklift for the Pratt family, now he has joined them as a repeat member of the Financial Review Rich List.
From humble beginnings in a Greek farming village, Andrianakos will be a newly minted billionaire on the 2022 Rich List published in AFR Magazine on Friday. His debut 2021 valuation has grown by more than 25 per cent thanks to surging valuations for a property portfolio that is a legacy of his days as one of Melbourne’s biggest service station owners.
Nick Andrianakos, pictured last week in Greece’s Nafplio, where the forklift driver turned petrol king is, at 78, building a hotel. Athina Souli
“I tell my kids to this day – land, land, land,” the 78-year-old says from the ancient Greek capital of Napflio. He flew to the picturesque town on the Mediterranean Sea as soon as COVID-19 restrictions allowed, not for a holiday but to build a hotel, a purpose befitting someone who admits that property is a lifelong passion.
It took Andrianakos a decade of hard graft to save for his first bit of real estate: a BP service station on Liverpool Road in Coburg, which cost him $81,000 in 1976.
He had arrived in Australia 10 years earlier, part of the post-World War II exodus from Europe that has produced many other Rich List empires based on the dogged pursuit of opportunity: think the Lowys, the Salteris, the Casellas, the Perichs, the list goes on.
In 2017, the Andrianakos name joined that class when Nick sold what was by then 54 service stations to their fuel supplier, Caltex, for $95 million.
Needless to say, Andrianakos kept the land underneath the bowsers and became landlord to the fuel multinational, although his eye for real estate had long extended beyond what was required for his Milemaker Petroleum chain.
The properties and rents related to the service stations now comprise less than 30 per cent of an empire that since the 1990s has contained swaths of industrial and commercial property and even a winery in Melbourne and its surrounds.
Since the exit to Caltex he has bought office towers in Adelaide and Brisbane, adding to three he already had on St Kilda Rd, while this month his Nikos Property Group – now run by son Theo – acquired Australia’s fourth-largest shopping mall site, Adelaide’s 36-hectare Colonnades