Brookfield Property Partners and Dexus Property Group’s main wholesale fund will bring a major tower in Brisbane’s Queen Street to market that is tipped to reap about $150 million.
The groups are selling the tower when relatively few Brisbane towers are available and buyers are hunting for stock outside Sydney and Melbourne.
Relatively few deals have been struck in the city this year.
Kevin Seymour last month sold the HSBC Tower to Singapore-listed ARA Asset Management in a $188m deal brokered by JLL and Knight Frank.
That building appears destined for ARA’s Peninsula Investment Partners, a fund set up last year to invest in developed real estate markets across Asia.
Melbourne-based Forza Capital is also raising capital to back the purchase of Armada Funds Management’s South Brisbane office building in a $65m CBRE-brokered deal.
ISPT has put the Green Square South Tower in Fortitude Valley on the block for more than $200m through Colliers International, after interest from AIMS Financial did not result in a deal.
But the Brookfield-Dexus tower at 324 Queen Street is the only major asset openly available in the heart of Brisbane.
The 25-level office complex has been extensively refurbished. The A Grade tower is on a valuable 1821sq m site and spans a net lettable area of 20,124sq m. It has ground floor retail including the ANZ Bank Chamber.
The Dexus Wholesale Property Fund, a $6.9 billion open-ended unlisted property fund, has been a major buyer in Brisbane and appears to reweighting its holdings. For Brookfield, the sale continues its $2bn-plus office portfolio selldown.
Brookfield was yesterday close to completing the sale of a key Sydney complex occupied by Macquarie Bank at Kings Street Wharf to Charter Hall Group, which is buying with the support of its own funds and those run by Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing.
Brookfield is in line to reap more than $500m for 1 Shelley Street, and the deal brokered by Savills and CBRE could set a benchmark for the office market.
Last month, Brookfield added $450m worth of office assets to its disposal program, putting towers in Parramatta and Canberra on the block. The group kicked off the country’s largest real estate portfolio sales last August, putting half-interests in Perth’s landmark Brookfield Place and Melbourne’s Southern Cross complex on the market.
Private equity giant Blackstone purchased a half-interest in the Melbourne complex for $675m, while Brookfield kept the landmark WA tower. The Canadian group also offloaded its minority stake in the 600 Bourke Street tower to an AMP Capital fund in a Savills-brokered deal valuing the interest at just over $240m.
Originally Published On: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/