Capital gain
Sizzler restaurants, with their all-you-can-eat salad bars and signature cheese toast, are staging a comeback in Sydney six years after leaving the country.
Minor Hotel group will open the casual, family-friendly dining concept, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, in their new NH Collection Hotel at Sydney airport in coming months.
The eatery, founded in the US in 1958, closed all its Australian restaurants in November 2020 after the pandemic disrupted the business.
Minor’s founder and chairman Bill Heinecke confirmed while he was in Sydney this week that Sizzler would return to Australia’s shores. Heinecke told Capital Gain that Minor intends to roll out the restaurant brand across the country.
He said Sizzler would initially operate within the group’s Minor hotels but the venues will be open to the public.
Minor operates more than 640 hotels, resorts and branded residences across 59 countries around the world. Its Minor Food division owns Coffee Club, which has been selling Sizzler’s famous cheese toast to customers. There group will also bring back the popular Benihana Japanese restaurants.
“We have a number of exciting projects in Australia with the opening of the 90-room NH Collection hotel at 102-106 Robey Street, Mascot, and the Avani in Wollongong, and we are also looking at branded residences,” he said.
“Sizzler can be in hotels or as standalone sites, depending on the opportunities.”
The hotel sector is gaining momentum. Sydney-based developer Fortis is looking for a hotel manager for its project in Richmond in Melbourne’s inner east. Emirates airline has injected $50 million to upgrade its Wolgan Valley resort in regional NSW which will be managed by Marriott International as the Emirates Wolgan Valley Ritz Carlton Lodge.
Flat pack
Furniture giant IKEA is selling its long-standing warehouse at 1-3 Leeds Street in Rhodes with a big ticket price of around $90 million.
The warehouse, deemed surplus to requirements, covers 6109 square metres on a 10,135 sq m site. While large, it’s not as big as another of IKEA’s sites on the Princes Highway in Tempe, which is flat-pack furniture retailer’s biggest in the southern hemisphere.
The Rhodes site has the potential to significantly increase the density of buildings on the block to take advantage of the government’s Infill-Affordable Housing Bonus. Several established developers are constructing in the area, including Billbergia, Deicorp, Meriton and E-Cove.
Savills agents Stuart Cox, Neil Cooke, Johnathon Broome and Houssam Yakzan said the site has a 123-metre north-facing frontage to the Parramatta River. Early interest is around $90 million-plus, the said.
Cupit and Ford
Private fund manager Centennial, run by property stalwarts Paul Ford and David Cupit, has swooped on a strategic industrial site at 15 Daniel Street in Wetherill Park for $42.1 million.
The property will be added to the Centennial-managed $780 million Enhanced Value Partnership fund which already boasts 14 assets on Australia’s eastern seaboard. The site was sold by the privately owned Madad group.
The 2.05-hectare block has a 7449 sq m warehouse fully leased to Sunrise Medical. Alongside that is 8000 sq m of vacant developable land with approvals in place for a multi-tenant estate worth around $74 million.
Cupit, head of funds management at Centennial, said Wetherill Park was a core infill market in Sydney’s central west and had been on the company’s investment radar for some time.
Centennial is primarily focused on industrial and logistics, office, retail and boutique residential property. It has a portfolio of 68 assets and around $2.5 billion funds under management.
ReVest Property Group’s Elijah Shakir brokered the off-market sale.
Flying high
A large, triple-frontage last-mile development site at Mascot is being sold by private investors ISAK Investments. Company records show the vendor is a family-owned company headed by Sydney Tatler Wines hoteliers, brothers Theo and Spiro Isak.
The two adjoining parcels of land on the corner of 210 O’Riordan Street and 133-137 Baxter Road are on the market with price expectations north of $30 million.
The site has approval for a 13-storey commercial office tower with physical commencement status from the Land & Environment Court. If completed, it will have 10,800 sq m of office space with 187 car spaces on a 2100 sq m site.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Tom Barnie, Nick Mallett and Jake Smith have the listing.
Across town, two contiguous offices at 94 and 196A Miller Street in North Sydney owned by the NSW government have sold for a figure in the “mid to upper $20 million range.”
The 2289 sq m buildings, adjacent to the Victoria Cross metro station, were acquired by the adjoining owner Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College as an opportunity for long-term strategic consolidation.
The transaction was managed by Colliers’ Tom Appleby, Joseph Lin and Charlie Gilmour.
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