Dexus Snaps Up Industrial Assets for $173m

Dexus has secured two large-format industrial properties in New South Wales and Victoria, worth a combined $173 million.

The first acquisition at 37-39 Wentworth Street in Greenacre, south-west of Sydney’s CBD, is a 19,246sq m modern cold store facility leased to Real Dairy Australia and Tomkin.

The facility sits on a 4-hectare site and includes a 5,950sq m expansion currently under development for Real Dairy Australia.

In Victoria, Dexus has picked up a new 51,595sq m prime grade logistics facility in Merrifield currently being developed for Ford Australia as their national spare parts distribution centre.

The new purpose-built parts distribution facility, to be constructed by Texco, will comprise a 50,580sq m warehouse and a 900sq m office occupying an 87,691sq m site, featuring a 5-Star Green Energy rating.

Merrifield Business Park in Mickleham will eventually become the largest business park in Victoria. On completion, it will be bigger than the Melbourne CBD, spanning 415 hectares and creating up to 25,000 jobs in the process.

The properties will now be placed into the Dexus Australian Logistics Trust and will lift the developer’s industrial property portfolio to more than $5 billion.

The unlisted logistics trust has investment from Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC.

Dexus chief executive Darren Steinberg said the acquisitions would build on the trust’s mandate to acquire quality, well-leased assets that would deliver favourable total returns.

The transaction harks back to similarly significant deals undertaken by Dexus over the financial year, completing or exchanging more than $1.6 billion of property acquisitions.

While the retail and office property markets have largely been in hibernation during Covid-19, sales activity across the industrial and logistics sector has carried on.

Last month, Charter Hall spent $648 million in a joint venture with Allianz Real Estate on a logistics property portfolio owned by German supermarket giant Aldi.

The listed developer also picked up an asset in Sydney’s Erskine Park, with the funds giant securing the Winc distribution facility for about $115 million—a mid- to high- four per cent yield.

Logistics giant ESR is also an eager investor in the market, having launched a $1 billion fund in March to develop and hold its own logistics assets, with several properties currently it its sights.

The Hong Kong-listed logistics platform is also eyeing new opportunities in the Asian industrial sector after announcing a US$1 billion fund alongside joint venture partners APG and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

CIP also recently acquired a 2.4-hectare industrial development site in Brisbane’s Bundamba, which has development approval for a 10,200sq m warehouse facility.