Arq nightclub owner Shadd Danesi sells another Darlinghurst investment property for $13.75 million
The owner of Sydney’s Arq nightclub, Shadd Danesi, has offloaded another of his commercial properties, a Darlinghurst building, for $13.75 million.
With property investment partner George Hastie who co-owns the property, Mr Danesi had been trying to sell 256 Crown Street, Darlinghurst, for about a year with another agency. It had been the first time they listed the asset in 24 years.
The initial listing was about a year after he sold off the Imperial Hotel in Erskineville – where parts of the famous movie Priscilla were filmed – for some $6.5 million in 2015. The Erskineville venue, in Sydney’s inner-west, reopened this month after a $6 million restoration project.
The three-storey Darlinghurst building had been under negotiations leading up to the auction, with the sale price agreed just hours beforehand. It sold under auction conditions on Wednesday.
The property, on a 520-square-metre island site, received four offers from the 102 inquiries during the campaign.
Some of these offers were higher than the sale price, but came with terms to remove a few of the six tenants in the building from their lease, which would have been an expensive process, Ray White Commercial selling agent Justin Rose said.
“That wasn’t what the owners were after and it would just take too long to achieve a result like that,” he added.
A Sydney-based buyer, whose identity the agents could not reveal, eventually snapped up the property, as they were “more aggressive than the others and figured out what the owner wanted and said they’d pay that.”
The investors, who are not interested in it as a development site, plan to refurbish the building’s office and retail spaces to gain a better rental return.
The property, on land zoned for mixed-use development, has a gross building area of 1750 square metres, which has the potential for 40 apartments.
Mr Rose, who had the listing with Kristian Morris, said they knew from the start that the property had to be taken to auction to maximise its value.
“There’s always been interest in the property, but it just (needed) to get the buyers and vendors at the right price under the right conditions (with an auction campaign),” he said.
“We knew it needed a new agent to reinvigorate some of the old inquiries. Being on the market for so long, there was no energy in the campaign any longer.”
Mr Rose noted that the market for underdeveloped commercial blocks was expected to be strong this year.
“There’s so many off-market opportunities happening at the moment, a lot of buildings have been sold off-market, they don’t need to hit the market,” he said.
“The ones that represent upside, meaning upside in rent or development, they’re the ones everyone wants.”
The Darlinghurst site was one of three properties which sold at Ray White Commercial’s Sydney portfolio auction.
An industrial asset in Caringbah in Sydney’s south sold for $4.25 million, while a development site approved for 48 units in Gosford on the Central Coast fetched $1.8 million.
One of the two which passed in included Wheels and Dollbaby founder Melanie Greensmith’s former workspace of 20 years in Surry Hills, which passed in on a vendor’s bid of $750,000.
