Watering Holes adds North Sydney’s Union Hotel to the tab with $22m buy

Good Beer Group has sold the Union Hotel in North Sydney to Ashton Waugh’s Watering Holes Hotels. Picture: Adam Yip / Manly Daily

The Good Beer Group has sold The Union Hotel in North ­Sydney to Ashton Waugh’s ­Watering Hole Hotels business for $22m.

The purchase took Watering Hole to 15 venues across NSW. “We’re delighted to acquire this significant Sydney freehold hotel and, in doing so, continue to deliberately expand our group into both metro and regional areas,” Mr Waugh said. The sale was brokered by HTL Property agents Dan Dragicevich, ­Andrew Jolliffe and Sam Handy.

The Good Beer Group has a stable of mainly CBD assets, ­including the Edinburgh Castle Hotel, Coronation Hotel and the KB Hotel in Surry Hills. The group has the Harold Park Hotel up for sale.

The Union Hotel sits on a 784sq m site and has a midnight licence and 26 gaming machines.

“In such fluid times from a global perspective, we are seeing a noticeable uptick in buyer ­inquiry as a patent flight towards hard asset backed hotel properties emerges, and which have, as an investment class and over multiple cycles, proven themselves to be both resilient and recession-proof,” Mr Dragicevich said.