Hotelier Chris Feros has sold the Terrey Hills Tavern – which occupies a 16,000sqm site in Sydney’s northern suburbs – to Endeavour Group and Charter Hall after 16 years of ownership.
The $40m deal sees Endeavour Group take over the leasehold, with fund manager Charter Hall acquiring the freehold, and is Endeavour Group’s first pub deal since its demerger from Woolworths and public listing last month.
This latest acquisition demonstrates that Sydney’s lockdown has not dampened investor demand in the hotly contested pub sector. At the time of its demerger last month, Endeavour Group pledged to increase its investment in hotel venues.
“Endeavour Group is pleased to welcome the Terrey Hills Tavern to the Group and consider it a great fit with our portfolio, adding to both our hotel and retail networks,” a company spokesperson said. “We look forward to continuing to offer great service to the local community.”
Chris Feros said he was pleased to find “a suitor commensurate with the scale and earnings profile of our family hotel asset”.
He told Australian Hotelier that the sale would enable the Feros Group to reinvest into new pub projects including yet-to-be announced greenfield sites.
“We wanted to take advantage of the market. It’s so hot at the moment as investors are seeing how resilient pubs can be, and this will allow us to free up the balance sheet and start more projects.”
HTL Property, which managed the sale, said it had been involved in a “very active sale process” for the Terrey Hills Tavern.
“The highly competitive sales process for the ever popular, ultra-large format Terrey Hills Tavern drew considerable national interest from a variety of buyer profiles befitting its intrinsic property fundamentals and trading volume,” HTL Property national director Dan Dragicevich said.
HTL Property’s managing director, Andrew Jolliffe said: “The Endeavour Group is an autarch and like others of its ilk and strategic imperative, including Redcape and AVC, finds itself enjoying the fire power and corporate capacity needed to consolidate a still fundamentally fragmented asset class.”