Capital Gain
Each bed in an eight-storey student accommodation building in the inner-city university precinct of Chippendale cost its buyer $440,000.
Student accommodation provider The Living Co, which operates the large-scale Scape Australia brand, has swooped on a building at 15-25 Regent Street in a $72 million deal – equivalent to a per-bed rate of $440,000.
Scape put its foot on the Boston University Sydney Academic Centre after vendor TJAC Development, a Boston-based real estate investment and development company focused on student housing and academic centres, offered it for sale.
The property has 165 beds across a mix of three- and four-bedroom “cluster apartments”. It has been the Sydney home of Boston University’s Study Abroad Program since 2011. To make studying fun, it has a rooftop terrace, communal kitchen, library, lecture theatres, laundry facilities, management accommodation and secure bicycle parking.
The Boston building will add to Scape’s growing empire.
Co-founded by Stephen Gaitanos and Craig Carracher in 2013, The Living Co also owns the Aveo seniors living brand and build-to-rent company RTL Co. It has $17 billion in assets under management and a portfolio of about 30,000 beds. The group controls 118 buildings, with another 10 under development. When complete, those 10 will boost its beds by 6000. In July last year, it purchased a site in Waterloo for $32 million and in December paid $49.5 million for a property in Redfern.
Knight Frank’s Tim Holtsbaum and Luke Shackleton negotiated the sale.
Local storage
Storage giant StoreLocal has expanded its western Sydney footprint, adding two new sites in a deal valued at a combined $57 million.
StoreLocal is in expansion mode as more people downsize and their need for storage grows. The new deals add to the group’s 43 nationwide outlets.
The facilities, developed by SeventySix and constructed by Akura, include 5 Abel Street in Jamisontown, which went for $23 million, and 3 Holbeche Road in Arndell Park, which changed hands for $34 million.
The Jamisontown property is on a 6306 square metre site, while Arndell Park spans a 9008 sq m. CBRE’s John Micallef advised on the sale.
True alliance
True Alliance, controlled by the Hendler brothers, is selling an industrial site in the tightly held South Sydney precinct with a price tag of around $100 million.
Purpose-built for True Alliance’s retail and apparel distribution business, the 13,140 sq m freehold property at 19 O’Riordan Street in Alexandria has long-term redevelopment potential.
Colliers’ Michael Crombie and Trent Gallagher said the block’s scale, zoning profile and inner-city positioning should appeal to owner-occupiers, institutional investors or potentially developers interested in data centre, self-storage, office, strata and hotel conversions.
Kan do
Letittia and Keith Willis have owned and run the Kandos Post Office for 20 years.
Now the couple are selling the historic post office in rural Kandos, a town in mid-western NSW. The property comes with the post office business and has a price guide around $550,000.
It just happens that August 30 marks the post office’s 100th anniversary.
The building was designed by the Government Architect at the time and is an example of a single-storey face-brick “Classical Revival” country post office. It sits on a prominent 675 sq m corner.
Kandos is known as the “town that built Sydney” because its local cement works supplied materials for major infrastructure like the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons and the underground railway.
Josh Stockwell from McGrath Central Tablelands is the agent on the sale.
Meanwhile, Sydney-based McGrath Estate Agents has signed a new partnership with Hodges Real Estate that will accelerate its expansion in Melbourne. The partnership is to be branded as Hodges McGrath and will operate in Bayside Melbourne and Rye in the Mornington Peninsula.
Founder and chief executive John McGrath said Hodges remains the longest operating real estate agency in Victoria, having opened in 1854, and will boost the McGrath business in these Melbourne suburbs.
carolynannecummins@gmail.com
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