This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
THE property joint ventures business has made a strong contribution to Abacus Property Group’s result.
Abacus underlying profit was $57.1 million for the six months to December 31, although it is lower than the previous corresponding period’s $69.1 million, the 2015 first half year result included a one off gain of $20.8 million from the sale of Birkenhead Point.
Excluding the one-off gain, the HY15 underlying profit was $48.3 million.
“The benefits of our multi-platform business have been illustrated with strong contribution from our property ventures business,” Managing director Dr Frank Wolf said.
“We have invested selectively across our residential development platform, utilising available capital in sectors offering the best risk adjusted returns. This has increased the contribution to underlying profit from property ventures while profits on sale transactions reduced over the period. Pleasingly we added to our third party capital platform with our residential development joint venture with CDL,” he added.
The property ventures division generated strong growth in underlying EBITDA, more than doubling to $30.8 million for the period.
Abacus also chalked up $9 million from development projects.
The funds management business generated an underlying EBITDA result of $5.6 million for the period. Abacus has $161 million of capital invested across the platform.
“We have had a good start to the financial year. We have delivered a strong underlying profit. A strong contribution from the property ventures platform illustrates the benefits or our multi-business model at this time in the cycle.
“Our third party capital platform continues to grow and a strong development pipeline across the investment portfolio and property venture platforms has potential to deliver significant value creation. The portfolio is well diversified in core markets across Australia and New Zealand with great potential to improve returns and strengthen the portfolio,” Wolf said.
Abacus is targeting a distribution of 17.0 cps for FY16.
Australian Property Journal
