This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
CENTURIA’S industrial portfolio across Australia and New Zealand is now in excess of $5.1 billion, with assets in this market now making up approximately 30% of the group’s platform.
Centuria has been extending its exposure to industrial assets across its ASX and NZX-listed funds and unlisted funds for several years now.
Particularly in securing the management of what is now Centuria Industrial REIT (CIP) in January 2017, with the REIT now Australia’s largest listed pure-play industrial fund.
“Centuria clearly has been executing a targeted and differentiated growth strategy specifically focusing on metropolitan infill sites that are catered to the last mile logistics sector,” said Ross Lees, head of funds management at Centuria.
With CIP’s recent acquisition of a $351.3 million portfolio of eight urban industrial freehold assets across Australia, brought the fund’s portfolio value up to $3.5 billion and boosted Centuria’s total industrial platform up to 167 assets.
Lees pointed to this latest acquisition as proving the success of CIP’s s high-quality infill metropolitan market investment strategy, which the group now plans to apply across all of its unlisted funds in Australia and New Zealand.
“This $5.1billion milestone is a significant achievement for the Group. It reaffirms our corporate strategy to invest into new asset classes through corporate acquisitions, then using the Group’s strong balance sheet and distribution capability further bolster market dominance within these specific sectors,” said Jason Huljich, joint CEO of Centuria.
In New Zealand, following the group’s merger with Augusta Capital and the acquisition of the NZ$178 million Visy Glass manufacturing facility, the pure-play Centuria New Zealand Industrial Fund (CNZIF) has now reached NZ$547 million in industrial assets under management.
While the NZX-listed Asset Plus Limited (APL) is set to develop a 38,000sqm industrial facility in Kamo, Whangarei.
“We’ll continue to further support New Zealand’s expanding industrial portfolio across its unlisted funds as we will with Primewest, which already has a healthy 47-asset industrial portfolio,” said Huljich.
CIP has also delivered a gross total shareholder return of 117.6%, outclassing the S&P/ASX 300 A-REIT Index by 69.3% over in the four and a half years since its establishment.
“Our growth within the industrial sector is centred around the acquisition of high-quality, well located industrial and logistics assets,” said Jesse Curtis, fund manager for CIP.
“As the sector is experiencing strong tailwinds and competition for assets increases, we attribute our continued success to the deep knowledge and expertise of our in-house acquisitions, development and asset management teams with the group having transacted more than $1.3billion of industrial transactions over the last 15 months and with an industrial development pipeline of $158million delivering projects across Australia and New Zealand,” concluded Curtis.
