Home Property Australia Vicinity offloads retail portfolio

Vicinity offloads retail portfolio

  • May 10, 2016

Vicinity offloads retail portfolioContinuing its divestment program, and following the sale announced last week of Indooroopilly Central, Vicinity Centres has sold a portfolio of four shopping centres to Blackstone and Mirvac for a total of $841.4 million.Including the Indooroopilly sale, Vicinity has now reaped a total of $926.4 million from the asset divestment program. According to Michael O’Brien, chief investment officer at Vicinity, the sale proceeds will be used to repay debt in the short term but, over time, will be reinvested into other development and acquisition opportunities.The four-centre portfolio comprises Toombul and Clifford Gardens centres in Queensland and Forest Hill Chase and Brimbank shopping centre in Victoria. US Investment giant Blackstone, which earlier this month sold a portfolio of five large format retail assets to Aventus for $219 million, will pay $613.3 million for Clifford Gardens, Forest Hill Chase and Brimbank Shopping Centre. Mirvac will buy the Toombul centre for $228.1 million.Clifford Gardens, in the Queensland regional city of Toowoomba, has a gross lettable area of 27,789 sqm and is anchored by Big W, Woolworths and Coles.Forest Hill Chase in metropolitan Melbourne has a total gross lettable area of 61,470 sqm and is anchored by Big W, Target, Harris Scarfe, Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Hoyts Cinemas.Brimbank Shopping Centre in the western suburbs of Melbourne, with a total area of 37,907 sqm, is anchored by Target, Coles, Safeway and Aldi.Toombul Shopping Centre in inner suburban Brisbane has a gross lettable area of more than 44,000 sqm and includes Coles, Kmart, Target, ALDI and BCC Cinemas. A Bunnings store will open in the centre in the first half of 2017.The portfolio sale price reflects about a 1 per cent discount to the combined 31 December 2015 book values of the four assets and a weighted average capitalisation rate of 7 per cent. Simon Rooney, head of Retail Investments at JLL, negotiated the portfolio sale to Blackstone and Mirvac.Last week Vicinity announced the sale of Indooroopilly Central in suburban Brisbane to private Asian invest Denis Jen for $85 million and a joint venture with Perth Airport Pty Ltd for the development of a DFO outlet at the airport.