Wentworth buys Sydney’s Rydalmere estate for $152.1m as Dexus steps up assets sale

Sydney is a focus for Wentworth Capital’s new property fund.

Property group Dexus is stepping up the sale of assets from its $12.9bn wholesale property fund, divesting a hi-tech industrial estate in the Sydney suburb of Rydalmere for $152.1m.

The company’s Dexus Wholesale Property Fund has been offloading assets to meet investor redemptions and has more office assets coming up for sale. But industrial assets have proven the fastest to sell.

The Rydalmere Metro Centre was bought by expanding boutique property operation Wentworth, which recently unveiled a $350m opportunistic property fund. The deal shows the strong demand for assets in industrial assets in the Sydney metropolitan area.

The Rydalmere estate is a mixture of office and industrial space situated across two high-clearance industrial allotments in Sydney’s west. The site has a combined gross lettable area of 40,045sq m and a cross-dock warehousing facility.

Dexus chief executive Ross Du Vernet.

It sits on 5.1ha of land across two allotments and has a high exposure site providing two street frontages and good connections to major arterials.

The Western Sydney estate could benefit from rising rentals as it carried a short-weighted average lease expiry of 2.7 years by income with staggered lease expiries.

The price was above book value and a fund spokesman said it was sold “in line with our strategy to recycle capital from older, office-heavy industrial properties into modern, purpose-built developments”.

Selling agents JLL and CBRE put the assessed net market income at $10.68m – or $267 per sq m – making the market yield about 7 per cent.

Wentworth said its opportunistic private equity real estate fund was the first such “sector-agnostic” trust in the market to reach its full target size in Australia since market conditions deteriorated in 2022.

Wentworth said about 50 per cent of the blind fund’s capital had already been deployed in co-investments totalling more than $600m in strategic off-market transactions.

It has been backed by institutions such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and family offices.

Its portfolio consisted of seven premium assets, spanning inner-ring industrial land, a wholesale residential portfolio, premium office, and life sciences assets.