THE developer behind a £125million luxury hotel planned for Glasgow city centre is to bid to build the Commonwealth Games village.

Glasgow-born Charles Price has put together a high-powered consortium which has visited the site.

They are the first to lodge a formal note of interest with the city council on the Games village development.

Mr Price said they want to build hundreds of ecological houses, at a likely total cost of £125m, which will be the first of their kind in the world.

Much of the construction would be done off site and transported to the land opposite Celtic Park, where the 8000 athletes will be based.

Mr Price said: "I have a long connection with the site, having been a significant owner of land there since I took over my company in 2003."

He insisted creating long term jobs would be one of the consortium's main priorities.

Arms length city council company City Building was invited to join the group after Mr Price visited the operation earlier this year.

In 2006, Mr Price spent a week at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne touring the athletes village.

He said: "I wanted to see for myself the challenges they faced and to see if I could anticipate some of the problems that might arise in Glasgow, and find solutions.

"I would like to make the village the leading ecological development of its type - the first in the world."

Instead of building a development made up mainly of flats, Mr Price wants to build an athletes village which can be transformed into family homes when the Games are over.

He said: "We want to create a community and a community requires family accommodation. "

Mr Price's consortium includes Mace, one of the world's leading consultancy and construction firms, Caledonian Building, which specialises in the design, manufacture and construction of permanent, multi-storey buildings using off-site modular construction, Glasgow construction engineers Woogar Hunter, global property advisors DTZ and BDO Stoy Hayward, the world's fifth largest accountancy network.

It is likely to be November this year before a developer is selected and work is not expected to start on site until 2010.

Mr Price has been granted planning permission to build the six star Argyle International Hotel in the city's International Financial Services Sector.