Final bids landed on Monday for a stake in the Gold Coast Airport owner Queensland Airports, with AustralianSuper tipped as the group to take out the contest.
It is being advised by Bank of America and has a tax advantage in buying the airport interest, being Australian owned, while Dexus is in the mix and the other bidding consortium, KKR with Skip Capital, advised by RBC, may have bid but is thought to be an outside chance at best.
Queensland Airports owns regional airports including Gold Coast, Townsville, Mount Isa and Longreach.
After being delayed while structural matters surrounding the airport sale were ironed out, the $1.5bn-plus sale process run through Barrenjoey and Macquarie Capital will see a 74 per cent stake sold.
Shareholders include The Infrastructure Fund, Perron Investments, QAL Investments, STC Funds Nominee, the Australian Retirement Trust, Allan Moss and Lipno Holdings.
REA has work to do
Some expect that the News Corp-controlled REA Group will likely sweeten its offer for its British peer Rightmove one more time by as much as 20c a share to see a deal get done, and then its job will be to convince shareholders that its bold move into the United Kingdom will pay off.
It’s now made three offers for the business, with the latest cash and scrip offer at the weekend at 770p per share, valuing the target at about $11.95bn (£6.1bn), which Rightmove’s board said would be carefully considered. Earlier in the week an offer of 749p a share was rejected.
The original offer on September 5 was at 705p per share.
Analysts at Citi believe one of the opportunities for REA is to leverage its product set in Australia to enhance the Rightmove offering for both agents and consumers.
But they add that the UK real estate market agency market is quite competitive compared to Australia, with average real estate agent commissions at about 1 per cent in the UK and have been under pressure.
KKR seeks to offload Colonial First State stake
KKR is understood to be creating a data room for at least one prospective trade buyer to consider the $3bn-plus wealth management business, Colonial First State.
Anglo ready to announce winner of coal mine auction
A decision by Anglo American about its Queensland-based coal assets is believed imminent, a week on from when final bids were due.