This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
SENTINEL has sold the Geraldton Homemaker Centre in Western Australia to billionaire Gerry Harvey’s Harvey Norman for $28.25 million, as the group continues to shed its retail property assets.
Located 425 kilometres north of Perth, the complex at 208-210 North West Coastal Highway is on 4.7 hectares of land with a gross lettable area of 15,948 sqm. Among its 12 tenants are The Good Guys, Super Cheap Auto, Spotlight and Forty Winks, and the asset has a weighted average lease expiry of 2.47 years.
The centre was completed in late 2006 and expanded with a McDonald’s tenancy in 2010. Sentinel acquired the property for $27.3 million in 2015 as its first asset in the state.
“The decision to sell was based on Sentinel’s strategy of buying at an opportune time and then selling based on our view of the market,” Sentinel executive chairman and chief investment officer, Warren Ebert said.
Convenience, supermarket and large format retail assets have been in high demand among investors due to their resilience during the pandemic.
Geraldton is the third most populous place in the state, behind Perth and Bunbury, and is a service and logistics centre for regional mining, fishing, wheat, sheep and tourism industries.
The sale further reduces Sentinel’s retail footprint to just 28.1%. In the middle of 2015 this stood at 61.34%.
Over the past 12 months the group has sold City West Plaza at Sunshine in Melbourne for $39 million and the Riverdale Shopping Centre in the New South Wales regional city of Dubbo for $20.17 million.
Sentinel’s only remaining asset in Western Australia is the Port Hedland Boulevard Shopping Centre, for which it paid $17.6 million for in 2016.
