Fairfax Media has sold its print and distribution plant at Chullora in western Sydney to property fund manager Charter Hall Group for $45 million.
The deal was announced shortly after Fairfax last week sold its former Tullamarine print site in Melbourne to luxury car dealership Zagame Group for $16 million. Both plants had been decommissioned and flagged for sale for some time.
Chullora includes an existing industrial complex of 37,600 sq metres on more than ten hectares of land. The plant was completed in 1995 at a cost of $340 million as Fairfax centralised printing operations following the closure of its Broadway and Condell Park sites.
Chullora was decommissioned last year and the printing operation shifted to a smaller site at North Richmond, NSW.
Fairfax Media Limited is pleased to announce the sale of its Chullora print site located in NSW for $45 million, said the company in a brief statement. Contracts have been exchanged with settlement expected to occur on 2 November 2015.
The Chullora facility will sit in Charter Hall Core Plus Industrial Fund (CPIF), according to the fund manager.
"The Chullora acquisition presents a strategic site acquisition in which CPIF can increase the floor space and capture strong tenant demand that exists for space within prime Sydney industrial precincts,” CPIF manager Paul Ford told Fairfax Media. “This acquisition increases the prime Sydney weighting of CPIF and extends the group's industrial platform beyond $3 billion."
Charter Hall is now in discussions with automotive and logistics companies to occupy the former plant, according to a report in The Australian Financial Review.