Charter Hall checks in at Metcash facility as Blackstone exits
In one of the larger recent industrial property deals, fund manager Charter Hall is set to acquire a Metcash logistics facility from Blackstone for $183.6 million.
The deal, which is expected to be finalised within days, is expected to be struck on a yield of around 5.15 per cent. Underpinning that yield is the covenant to the ASX-listed Metcash, which has a 10-year lease.
The relatively tight yield is also indicative of the increased attention from institutional investors into the industrial property sector.
Private equity giant Blackstone declined to comment, as did Charter Hall, which has been steadily adding to its industrial portfolio even as it makes headlines for landmark office acquisitions, such as its recent $830 million acquisition of the Telstra headquarters in Melbourne.
The mooted deal was brokered by JLL’s Tony Iuliano, who was not available for comment.
Underlining the rising interest in the industrial sector, the Metcash deal follows hard on the heels of another mega-deal in the north: Singapore’s Frasers Logistics and Industrial Trust sale a half-stake in a Coles cold storage distribution centre at Parkinson, south of Brisbane, to global investment manager DWS for $134.2 million.
That deal, struck in June on a yield of about 5.6 per cent, represented the largest individual sale by value – taken at 100 per cent – to date for a cold storage facility.
The Metcash facility is on Magnesium Drive in Crestmead on the Logan Motorway corridor, the main logistics precinct in south-east Queensland.
The logistics facility sits on a substantial land parcel of 210,300 square metres. The distribution centre comprises three buildings totalling 89,254 sq m.
For Charter Hall, and its investors, there is the prospect a value-add play through the surplus land holding of over 11,000 square metres. The lease to Metcash includes fixed 3 per cent annual reviews.
While Charter Hall is steadily building out its industrial portfolio – second only to locally listed global giant Goodman – on the sell side private equiteer Blackstone has been busily trading in and out of the industrial sector in line with its opportunistic, value-adding strategy.
Last December it outlaid $33 million for two industrial facilities in Sydney and Melbourne, with the two deals struck on a blended yield of below 6 per cent.
A month earlier, Blackstone boosted its investment in Australia’s refrigerated logistics sector after paying $55 million for a major Ingham’s production facility in Brisbane.
Its industrial deals cannot rival Blackstone’s blockbuster purchase last month of office towers above Westfield Sydney in a record $1.52 billion deal.
