Shenhua Group NSW Liverpool Plains farms for sale

The Chinese coal giant, Shenhua Group, is selling its NSW Liverpool Plains farms for more than $120 million.

Chinese coalmining giant Shenhua Group is offloading its extensive rural property portfolio on the farming-rich Liverpool Plains of northwest NSW for a whopping $122 million-plus.

The offering comes just months after the state-owned Shenhua brokered a multimillion-dollar deal with the NSW Government to walk away from its $1 billion Watermark coalmining project in the region, following years of widespread community unrest.

The Watermark project, which was expected to see 10 million tonnes of coal extracted annually over a 30-year period, received state and federal government approval but was railed against by locals who argued it could damage one of Australia’s richest food bowls.

The Shenhua offering comprises 16,570 hectares of land, bought at premium prices by the company over the past decade, in the Breeza, Tambar Springs and Barraba districts around Gunnedah.

CBRE has been appointed to handle the sale with expressions of interest closing on August 26.

The Breeza aggregation, made up of 14 properties totalling 14,246 hectares, is expected to fetch more than $115 million with the two-farm Tambar Springs and Barraba aggregations likely to command $4 million and $3 million respectively.

CBRE Agribusiness managing director David Goodfellow said the properties would be offered as a whole or in separate parcels. “One of the things we are pretty focused on is giving the opportunities to locals to buy that land back, and we are prepared to split the land up to enable that,” Mr Goodfellow said. “But at the same time the great attraction here is that someone has already done the work to build this massive aggregation, so it is going to be of genuine interest to the big corporates.”

He said some of the land leant itself perfectly to carbon projects to complement livestock operations and summer and winter cropping enterprises.

The Shenhua parcel is the latest in a long list of $100 million-plus offerings to hit Australia’s “red hot” rural property market in recent months.

In March, Macquarie Agriculture listed its Lawson Grains business, of 105,000 hectares of cropping land in NSW and Western Australia, and billionaire Gina Rinehart announced plans to seven cattle stations totalling 1.88 million hectares in the Northern Territory and Western Australia for $300 million.

Last month Bahamas-based retail king Brett Blundy listed his 1.3 million-hectare Walhallow and Amungee Mungee stations in the Northern Territory for about $230 million.

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