Abbotsford’s former Weston’s Biscuits factory crunched for $37m
An Abbotsford property that was once the Weston’s Biscuits factory and is now home to an Australia Post depot and Honeywell has sold for more than $37 million.
A Chinese buyer paid $37.28 million for the Lascorp and Herzog Group-owned building at 45-50 Grosvenor St, with agents saying it is a sign that Asian investment money is starting to find its way back into the Australian market.
The two major tenants have a weighted average lease expiry of six years, while the site has a net passing income of around $1.87 million per annum.
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The Abbotsford property comprises an 8145sqm building on a 9466sqm site, which includes an open-air car park of 1570sqm and frontages to Grosvenor St, Southhampton Crescent and the Yarra River.
CBRE’s Mark Wizel, who market the property with Josh Rutman, Julian White and Lewis Tong, says offshore investors are showing renewed interest in Australian commercial property.
The Abbotsford site sits on the banks of the Yarra River.
“This is in no way a return to the record investment period we had seen prior to 2017, and let it be said we may not see that level of spending again for a long time, but it does signal that offshore money, and particularly Chinese money, is on its way back,’’ he says.
Rutman says the level of interest in the Yarra River site was of little surprise, given its underlying land value as a development site.
“We expected a strong market reaction from investor/developers, particularly those who had expressed interest in several similar properties over the last 12 months, including the sale of a Woolworths-tenanted property in Mulgrave and a Hewlett Packard site in Forest Hill,” he says.
