Former Footscray Angling Club looking to reel in tenant

The former Footscray Angling Club is fishing for tenants, after hitting the rental market with a sleek new look.

Local real estate agent Craig Stephens snapped up the quirky Yarraville building at 70 Pentland Pde for $725,000 in October.

The Jas Stephens executive chairman went on to renovate the historic property and has now listed it for rent asking $750 per week.

“I polished the floorboards, added a coat of paint and airconditioning, and tidied it up,” Stephens says.

The property has been freshly painted and had its floorboards polished.

“I loved the space — it was always an aspiration to buy a property like this, (with) a bit of history being the old anglers’ club and also a butcher.

“The old concrete floor is still there from when it was a butcher.”

The red-brick building also still bares a sign labelling it the “Footscray and District Angling Club”.

Stephens says the one-bedroom property would be perfect for a tenant who wants to set up a home office or someone seeking a base for a creative business, like a graphic design or photography studio.

A tenant can secure the space for $750 per week.

The property housed the fishing club for 15 years.

The occupant will need to lodge a $3259 bond.

The building’s sale to Stephens was anything but smooth sailing, coming after the property passed in at auction on a $750,000 vendor bid in July and after two subject-to-finance offers of $750,000 fell through.

The fishing club paid about $3000 worth of “minor solicitor fees” for the building about 15 years ago, in a transfer from the defunct Yarraville Angling Club, and then spent a further $50,000 installing a new floor, improving the roof and building a storeroom.

The interior before the building’s sale and revamp.

Club president Lucky Pavlidis says members had met there monthly to discuss “where we’ve been fishing, what fish we’ve caught, what bait and lures we’ve used, and club business”.

But with numbers dwindling from a peak of about 100 around the time of its 1900 founding to just 15 odd, the club had decided to move to a space where it could keep its three boats that was closer to the water.

This article from the Herald Sun originally appeared as “Footscray Angling Club: Yarraville building casting net for tenant”.