Casuarina decisions pay off handsomely
CONSOLIDATED Properties Group has come home a retail winner at its Casuarina Beach community in northern NSW after five years.
It has sold its two-year-old Casuarina Village shopping centre for $27.4 million in a deal Consolidated Properties’ executive chairman Don O’Rorke said was a reflection of the group’s tenacity.
“We had to make some hard decisions five years ago in regard to our remaining Casuarina holdings,” he said.
“We were confident we’d be right in the long run … the Casuarina Village sale shows we’ve come up trumps.”
Consolidated Properties, in tandem with partner CVS Lane Capital Partners, has sold the complex to Sydney’s Whistle Funds Management on a 5.9 per cent yield. The centre is anchored by Coles and has 14 specialty stores.
Mr O’Rorke said Casuarina Village was a winner.
“It was fully leased on completion, we’ve never had a vacancy and turnover has been going up by north of 20 per cent each year.”
Consolidated Properties embarked on its Casuarina project on a 176ha site in 2003 and the masterplanned community today is home to more than 3000 people.
In 2012 Consolidated Properties had a Bank of Scotland International mortgage on some of its Casuarina land and, with the bank in distress, needed to refinance, which was hard to do given the GFC and its impact on the ability of investors to borrow.
Consolidated Properties’ solution was to sell off two major Casuarina holdings, one of them a 21ha parcel that went for $6.5 million and included the town centre site.
Consolidated Properties struck an arrangement whereby it would buy back three parcels within the 21ha site, including the 1.6ha towncentre site, for $8.5 million.
“The town centre land was very important to us,” Mr O’Rorke said. “We always had promised our residents a shopping centre.”
“Our preference was to hold the centre long-term with our partners at CVS Lane, but unsolicited offers for the asset caused us to reconsider our position and put it to the market.”
Mr O’Rorke said Consolidated Properties and CVS Lane would redirect some of the Casuarina Village proceeds to reconfiguring and enlarging the retail area at Pavilions Palm Beach.
The partners bought Pavilions, which was started in 2009 and includes two apartment buildings, for $16.25 million in October. The buy included 4391sq m of land which will be used for the retail expansion, which will include a Coles supermarket.
JLL directors Sam Hatcher and Jacob Swan handled the Casuarina Village sale.