Historic Mount Martha pub on the market

The Mornington Peninsula’s historic Dava Hotel is for sale.

The original building – at 614 The Esplanade, Mount Martha – was home to the Sisters of Charity and a boarding school, before becoming a preparatory school for boys in the 1920s.

The Dava Hotel, on Mount Martha’s Esplanade, has undergone major renovations over the past two decades.

It was redeveloped as The Dava Lodge Hotel and Guest House in the 1930s and has undergone major renovations over the past two decades.

The Dava sale comes after Bruce Mathieson’s ASX-listed Endeavour Group recently paid $50 million for the Rye Hotel.

The Dava Hotel has views across the bay.

Like the Rye, the 88-year-old Dava is on a large parcel of land – 1.55 hectares – fronting The Esplanade and with views across Port Phillip Bay.

The land value alone is about $20 million, but a long-lease term is expected to discount that number.

The hotel has been leased to casino pioneer John Haddad’s Taverns of Victoria for the past 20 years. It is half-way through a five-year term, with two more five-year options remaining, and returns $517,208 a year in rent.

Wilson Property and Stonebridge agents Rorey James, Kevin Tong and Nic Hage have the listing, but they are not expecting the big price paid for the Rye Hotel.

United expansion

United Petroleum founders Eddie Hirsch and Avi Silver have snapped up an East Hawthorn office building, paying $17 million for 465 Auburn Road.

The move follows an $18 million office deal at Kew Junction last week, suggesting there is some movement in the suburban office market following a long stalemate between buyers and sellers.

The two-storey 2739 square metre Auburn Road building had been one of Bunnings’ offices until the hardware giant moved to Botanicca in Richmond. It last changed hands in 2010 for $11.2 million.

Colliers agents Alex Browne, Ben Baines and James Zhuang; Stonebridge agents Julian White, Dylan Kilner, and Chao Zhang; and Adam Guest, from Wilson Commercial, sold the property. They declined to comment on the buyers, but a caveat on the title revealed their identities.

Hirsch and Silver are active property buyers – often for petrol stations. They recently spent about $6 million on a 1.21ha site at 335 Berwick-Cranbourne Road, Clyde North, and a similar amount on service stations at 747 Toorak Road and Kingsway, South Melbourne.

More hotels

A large hotel site part-owned by former AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes is back on the market.

The 1971 sq m property, at 540 Flinders Street, has frontage to Flinders Lane and comes with a permit for two hotel towers of 24 and 30 levels.

TP Real Estate Holdings – a joint venture between Fernandes and Singapore-listed Plato Capital – bought the two-storey building in 2016 for $19.9 million.

CBRE’s Scott Callow and Nathan Mufale, with Colliers’ Jozef Dickinson and Trent Hobart, are handling the listing. It is expected to fetch more than $30 million.

Around the corner, Indian billionaires Kapil and Rahul Bhatia have listed the vacant Quincy Hotel on Flinders Lane for around $120 million, and Far East Consortium is also selling the newly opened Ritz-Carlton, near Southern Cross railway station.

Recent JLL research shows 21 new hotels have opened in Melbourne in the past four years, adding 4889 rooms to lift the city’s overall capacity to 26,500 rooms.

A further 2000 rooms are under construction.

Healthcare no more?

The sale of aged care and medical facilities has been a constant theme since the pandemic. The high cost of construction means many of are being retained for medical or care-related uses.

However, some sales do not fit the mould. Next up is Cabrini Health’s palliative care hospice on the corner of Airlie Avenue at 616-646 High Street, Prahran – a high-end residential area.

While the Prahran median house price is $1.7 million, houses in this neck of the woods are regularly fetching up to $5 million, so the property is likely to sell for more than $10 million.

The former Windermere Hospital was established by renowned matron Edith Hughes-Jones in 1938 and sold to Cabrini in 1998. It has since moved palliative care into the main hospital campus, on Wattletree Road, Malvern.

JLL’s Josh Rutman, Jesse Radisich, Mark Stafford and MingXuan Li are selling the 2197 sq m site.

Another on the market is the former Bupa aged-care site in Donvale.

The 6600 sq m property, at 296-302 Springvale Road, includes an 115 bed facility and adjoining land and is expected to fetch more than $15 million.

It was built in 1991 and is on a large 18,224 sq m land parcel just off Mitcham Road and neighbouring two other aged-care properties.

CBRE’s Marcello Caspani-Muto, Sandro Peluso and Jimmy Tat are running an expression of interest campaign for the property.

One site that is also not returning to any kind of medical or aged care use is the Uniting Church’s former Uniting AgeWell site in Kew’s Studley Park precinct.

Last week, residential developer Michael Piccolo paid about $35 million for 18 Barry Street, in a deal negotiated by Colliers agent Hamish Burgess.

Piccolo is planning a low-rise $180 million luxury development for the 8475 sq m site, pitched at eastern suburban downsizers who want to stay in the neighbourhood.

Construction has started on Piccolo’s most recent project on Gore Street, Fitzroy, which was 70 per cent pre-sold to owner-occupiers.

Industrial release

An additional 23ha of industrial land is being released at the Merrifield Business Park in Mickleham, established by MAB Corp and Gibson Property.

To date, 70 hectares of the huge 415 ha estate has been developed, with Dulux, Ford and D’Orsogna all taking up space.

CBRE agents Daniel Eramo and Joe Brzezek are running the latest sales campaign.

Eramo said owner-occupiers have been the biggest buyers of space, snapping up 57 ha of the site.

The next stage will provide land purchase, turnkey and pre-lease space at a time when the north’s industrial vacancy rate is at a record low 1.09 per cent, and demand is at high.

Rents in the traditionally cheaper northern market surged 31.4 per cent in 2022.

This week, global internet retailing giant Amazon chose AustralianSuper’s nearby Craigieburn Logistics Centre for its new 209,000 sq m robot-run warehouse.

CBRE’s head of logistics research Sass J-Baleh said just 13 per cent of the city’s industrial-zoned land will be available for development in the next three years.

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