Sydney home of ASX on the market with $300m-plus price tag
Sydney’s A-grade commercial building Exchange Centre, home to the Australian Securities Exchange, in the CBD, is on the market and likely to fetch more than $300 million.
The owner of the building, Malaysia’s second-largest pension fund Kumpulan Wang Persaraan, bought the 20,329-square-metre, 13-level office property for $185 million in 2011. It is managed by the Investa Office platform.
Savills’ Simon Fenn, Ian Hetherington and Ben Azar have been appointed exclusively to sell the property.
The tower at 20 Bridge Street is one of the first institutional-grade Sydney CBD core offerings since June 2013, Savills said.
The tower at 20 Bridge Street is one of the first institutional-grade Sydney CBD core offerings since June 2013, said Savills. Photo: Supplied
Rare opportunity
“This is a rare opportunity to purchase 100 per cent interest in the Sydney core and we expect a strong mix of both local and offshore interest, likely to come from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and parts of Europe,” Savills NSW managing director Mr Fenn said.
The building is 96 per cent leased with a long weighted average lease expiry of more than seven years. The ASX Group occupies more than 45 per cent of the building, with a lease expiry of more than 11 years.
HSBC operated a branch at the ground floor of the property up until early this year, when they moved to Charter Hall’s newly redeveloped 333 George Street.
The property, which also benefits from having a basement auditorium, is close to Circular Quay and future mixed-use precincts such as Dalian Wanda’s Goldfields House, AMP’s Quay Quarter and Brookfield’s Wynyard Place which includes Wynyard train station.
20 Bridge Street could fetch up to $300 million. Photo: Supplied
The powerful Kumpulan Wang Persaraan or KWAP owns other eastern seaboard properties such as 737 Bourke Street and 747 Collins Street in Melbourne, and 179 Turbot Street in Brisbane.
It also has a portfolio of logistics assets in Queensland and NSW.
KWAP stands to make more than just a capital uplift on the sale of the property. With the Malaysian ringgit at a historic low against the Australian dollar, it would also make a solid foreign exchange gain, a strategy likely to be employed by many Malaysian investors this year, sources added.
