Vicinity to sell Salamander Bay shopping centre

Salamander Bay, a 24,000-square-metre mall north-east of Newcastle, is held in the Vicinity Retail Partnership, an exclusive wholesale fund that was previously operated by Novion, a forerunner to Vicinity.

Vicinity does not have an equity stake in the wholesale fund. Instead it acts as the fund and asset manager on behalf of powerful investors including the Future Fund and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Vicinity has already appointed Colliers International’s Lachlan MacGillivray to handle the property, which is anchored by Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Kmart.

First opened in 1986, the centre has more than 55 specialty stores as well.

Last year investors in the same unlisted fund run by Vicinity opted to off-load a half stake in the Runaway Bay shopping centre in Queensland.

That half-stake was snapped up by BRW rich lister Stan Perron’s Perron Group – which has partnered Vicinity on other retail investments – for about $150 million.

A year earlier, the wholesale fund – then managed by Novion before it merged with Federation to form Vicinity – sold off the Myer Centre in Adelaide to Singapore’s Starhill Global REIT for $288 million.

The move to divest Salamander Bay comes as the appetite for tightly held retail malls, regional and sub-regional, sharpens.

Last week Alceon and Brisbane-based developer Capital Transactions sold the sub-regional shopping centre at Redbank Plains in Queensland for $160 million to Singapore’s Rockworth Capital Partners.

That deal was struck on a yield of about 6 per cent.