This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
IT has taken nearly nine whole months, but the first metropolitan Sydney supermarket to be formally offered to the market this year is now up for grabs.
Greenacre Village Shopping Centre is expected to attract interest from private, institutional, and offshore investors as freestanding Coles and Woolworths-anchored opportunities in Sydney remain scarce.
JLL’s Nick Willis, Sam Hatcher, David Mahood and Sebastian Fahey have been appointed to sell Greenacre Village at 19 Boronia Road, Greenacre, in inner south west Sydney, via an expressions of interest campaign.
The centre offers a Coles and Liquorland lease being secured on a defensive “semi-net” lease and a weighted average lease expiry (WALE) of six years, and is set on a 7,493 sqm land holding in the heart of the Greenacre community.
Willis said there are a limited number of freestanding supermarkets in Sydney and further they are rarely traded, with only four being sold in the last five years.
“There continues to be a significant weight of capital looking to get exposure to the robust convenience retail sub-sector, however, there has always been a severe lack of opportunities in inner metropolitan Sydney,” he said.
“Given the unique fundamentals of this asset and its strong underlying land holding, we anticipate interest from all investors including private, institutional, and offshore capital.”
Coles Group’s results showed sales revenue growth of 5.9% to $40.5 billion, with a market cap of $21.23 billion.
Shopping centre transactions – including deals from neighbourhood centres to sub-regionals – froze during winter, despite more than 400,000 sqm of retail space being placed to the market, as the gap between the expectations of buyers and sellers widens. According to the Data App, deals that have gone through have been dominated by non-discretionary, supermarket-anchored retail assets.
Hatcher said the Greenacre Village’s positioning in close proximity to the Bankstown CBD, bustling high street of Greenacre and major transport nodes, provides the centre with significant future mixed-use development potential.
Recent rezoning in the area has significantly benefited the site with an increased floor-space ratio allowing for a total gross floor area of 18,733 sqm or potential to go up seven stories – primed to capture the demand of the projected population of 460,000 residents in the Canterbury Bankstown LGA by 2036.
Canterbury Bankstown Council is in the process of drafting the new Canterbury Bankstown masterplan which will introduce a commercial core zone and see the FSR and height controls intensify allowing for 18 to 25 storey towers.
