Luthern Church pays $11.7m for new Adelaide CBD headquarters

One of Australia’s biggest church groups will relocate its national HQ to the Adelaide CBD after a multimillion-dollar deal.

139 Frome St, Adelaide. Picture: Supplied by McGees Property

The Lutheran Church in Australia will relocate its national headquarters into Adelaide’s CBD, after spending $11.7m to acquire an office building in the city’s east end.

The five-level building on Frome St will become the new home for the Australian Lutheran College and its churchwide office, while part of the building will remain leased to existing tenants.

It follows the church’s $52.5m sale of its previous home in North Adelaide, which was carved up and sold off to developers last year.

Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand executive officer Brett Hausler said that while the church considered a move interstate, it held strong historical links to South Australia, and the opportunity to acquire

“We explored numerous locations around Adelaide – in the CBD, fringe, surrounding areas – and also looked at whether to relocate interstate,” he said.

“There’s been a very long and strong historical connection between the Lutheran Church and South Australia, especially with many original German Lutheran immigrants coming out from the late 1830s onwards.

“There’s always been that strong connection, and our national office has been traditionally in Adelaide, and so Frome St will be the new home for many of our national functions.”

The church is currently undertaking a refurbishment and fit-out of the building, ahead of a relocation from North Adelaide in August.

The Lutheran church is relocating from its expansive site in North Adelaide. Picture: Supplied by McGees Property

Mr Hausler said the church would occupy around 60 per cent of the building’s floor-space, which is located close to the Bethlehem and St Stephen’s Lutheran churches.

He said the church no longer needed the expansive college grounds at North Adelaide given its move from a residential learning model to a distributed model.

“The offices have been designed to support that structure,” he said.

“We’re designing a lot of multi-use space to enable people to come in and be able to use it for different purposes.

“We’ve even got a museum and exhibition space planned for the ground floor. It would be an opportunity for us to share the history of the church and also, more importantly, the work that we do in the community today, be that in education or through our congregations, aged care, community care, disability services.”

Adelaide developer Genworth Group acquired nine of the 12 North Adelaide allotments that were put on the market by the church last year, with plans for a luxury housing project.

The remaining three parcels within the 1.9ha estate were sold to buyers not wishing to be named, including a Sydney investor who purchased the State Heritage-listed Hebart Hall for$7.5m, with plans to restore the heritage aspects of the building and convert it into a residence.

The church’s links to the property date back to 1922, when the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Australia purchased and established it as the original location for Immanuel College before the college’s move to Novar Gardens in 1957.

The North Adelaide site later evolved into the main tertiary education institution for the church in Australia, providing education and residential accommodation to pastors, teachers, church workers and volunteers through the Australian Lutheran College.

Mr Hausler said some of the proceeds from the sale would go towards the acquisition and refurbishment of the Frome St building, with the rest going into an investment fund, which would be used to support the mission and ministry of the church.

McGees Property’s James Juers and Simon Lambert brokered the North Adelaide site sale and acted for the Lutheran Church in its acquisition of the Frome St building.