Uniting Church Synod offloads $43m Melbourne office building
Chinese-backed commercial developer Golden Age has picked up a building in Melbourne’s Little Collins St belonging to the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania and high-profile developer Jonathan Hallinan, paying about $43 million.
The office building, known as the Uniting Church Centre, had carried approval for a 27-storey Elenberg Fraser-designed hotel but it appears to be the latest victim of the glut of hospitality and apartment projects.
Big groups, including Mirvac, have snapped up Melbourne sites from developers that have pulled back from undertaking hotels and units as there is a heavy oversupply in inner city areas.
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The building at 130 Little Collins St was sold by CBRE’s Mark Wizel, Julian White, Lewis Tong and Nathan Mufale and Colliers International’s Daniel Wolman, Guy Wells and Oliver Hay.
Wizel says the highly competitive process drew bids from local and international private investors, developers and institutions totalling more than $600 million.
“The volume of offers in this campaign from a wide variety of investors and developers demonstrated the depth of capital-seeking, high-quality offerings in the Melbourne CBD,” he says.
Wolman says that while the property has the benefit of a high-quality permit for a 184-room hotel development, the substantial improvements that have already been made were the major market attraction, and observers have suggested that Golden Age may focus on its office use.
“The result reflected the very strong demand for office investments in the nation’s tightest CBD office market,’’ he says.
The 3711sqm building, comprising eight levels of office and ground floor retail, sits on a 605sqm site that has corner exposure to Little Collins St and Coromandel Place.
Built in 1967 and refurbished in 1995, the building is configured to include an auditorium, meeting rooms, a chapel, offices and a basement car park. The property was sold with a lease-back, comprising a peppercorn rental, to the Uniting Church.
Golden Age is becoming more of an office player and it is ready to tap the market to find an end-purchase partner for a $300 million office project in east Melbourne that it is undertaking with local player Time & Place.
Founded by Jeff Xu in 2006, the company has a portfolio of commercial and residential assets and developments worth about $4.2 billion, with another $1.5bn in the pipeline.
This article originally appeared on www.theaustralian.com.au/property.
