It 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.
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.
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,It’s all a long way from Pikerni, a village about 160 kilometres west of Athens, where Andrianakos was raised on a farm that grew wheat and beans.
Upon returning to Pikerni, he discovered the village was almost empty. His two brothers were off studying to be a doctor and a banker, while most of his friends had moved to either the US, Canada or Australia, disillusioned by a perceived lack of reward for hard work in Greece.“When I left my parents were crying, but there was no other option.
“I could get 800 square metres with a veggie patch up there, all the other Greeks in Fitzroy and Richmond only had 200 square metres,” he says. The genial entrepreneur soon put the site into profit, after convincing a taxi company down the street to buy tyres from him exclusively, but it was five more years of hard slog before he could save enough to buy another one.
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