Private equity owner of Viridian Glass sells down real estate
The Melbourne manufacturing home of Viridian Glass, which was taken over by private equity player Crescent Capital Partners late last year, has hit the market with expectations of $100 million or more.
The site on Greens Road in Dandenong South is being offered under a sale-and-leaseback style deal. Viridian, the country’s biggest upstream manufacturer of float glass, will lease back the property for an initial term of eight years with fixed annual rental increases of 3 per cent.
In late November building products group CSR sold the Viridian Glass business to Crescent Capital Partners for $155 million, ending its costly association with glass manufacturing.
CSR had separately held onto the industrial property that is Viridian’s Sydney base in Ingleburn, which it subsequently divested.
Now Crescent is looking to reap a return from the real estate it holds through the Viridian deal, appointing JLL’s Tony Iuliano and Adrian Rowse to broker the 20.01-hectare site in Melbourne.
The site includes four warehouses with a clearance height range of up to nine metres, refurbished office, ancillary buildings and a recently completed cold-storage facility. The gross lettable area is 73,435 square metres.
Viridian operates on the site to manufacture, package and distribute glass materials including float glass, the company’s foundation product.
“The Dandenong South industrial precinct is currently experiencing significant increases in land values fuelled by the land-constrained nature of the precinct,” Mr Iuliano said.
Surplus land
Improvements to the site include Viridian’s $250 million float-glass tank, which has a capacity of up to 160,000 tonnes per annum.
The lease generates $5.6 million per annum while the site has surplus land of 3.6ha.
As much as $21 billion in capital is looking to invest in Australian industrial assets, according to a recent JLL report.
Investment in logistics facilities and other industrial property fell 40 per cent to $3.2 billion in 2018 – the first time since 2012 that industrial sale volumes were below the 10-year annual average of $3.7 billion – but that was due to the diminished availability of assets, not a lack of demand, according to the report this year.
