This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
FUND manager Centuria has again expanded its glasshouses portfolio with the circa $100 million acquisition of Katunga Fresh’s 21-hectare tomato-growing facility in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley.
Centuria now has total agriculture assets under management of $650 million. Within that is a fully-leased glasshouse portfolio of $450 million that spans more than 100 hectares and has a weighted average lease expiry of 17 years, sitting within the unlisted, open-ended Centuria Agriculture Fund (CAF).
CAF’s portfolio comprises five large-scale tomato glasshouse infrastructure facilities. The Katunga deal involves an off-market sale-and-leaseback transaction with the Van den Goor family’s Katunga Fresh with a 20-year triple-net lease. Katunga Fresh is one of Australia’s largest tomato suppliers, supplying Australia’s major supermarkets with year-round produce, and has operated from the site for 20 years.
“The Katunga facility is a high-quality precision farming asset, which aligns perfectly with our investment strategies and is backed by a strong tenant covenant,” said Jason Huljich, Centuria joint CEO.
“We aim to continue expanding CAF into one of Australia’s largest, sector-specific agriculture funds providing Centuria investors with access to high quality real estate opportunities, which in our view are critical Australian food bowl infrastructure assets.”
The Katunga asset has production capacity for approximately 16,000 tonnes of truss tomatoes per annum, aided by lighting technology that increases growing hours, produces yield and offsets the seasonality of production.
In addition to glasshouse facilities, site has large packing sheds, energy infrastructure, bore water licences and onsite water storage capacity.
Andrew Tout, Centuria head of agriculture, said, “We are pleased to partner with Katunga Fresh whose focus on high-efficiency production systems provide it with a genuine point of difference in the marketplace and enables the operator to generate a consistently profitable supply of fresh tomatoes and capsicums all-year-round”.
During the summer, Centuria paid $21.5 million for an Adelaide Plains greenhouse and glasshouse facility that produces tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and capsicums to be held in the CAF, and early last year forked out $80 million to acquire 20-hectare tomato glasshouse facility in Guyra, in the NSW Tablelands.
