A century later, former Lendlease executive buys back the family pub
Former Lendlease top executive Stephen McMillan and his brother, Scott McMillan, who until recently led Alliance Aviation, have snapped up a rural pub near Port Macquarie on the NSW Mid-North Coast for $1.75 million.
For the McMillan brothers, the acquisition of the Long Flat Pub, formerly called Travellers Rest Hotel, means bringing back into the family fold a pub that was owned and run by their grandmother in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Long Flat, it’s right in the middle of where the timber country used to be, and my grandfather owned the sawmill in Long Flat and my grandmother owned the pub,” Stephen McMillan told The Australian Financial Review on Thursday.
“You could say they controlled the economy of Long Flat at that time.”
Since 2000 – when he left Lendlease, where he led its Asian business and development arms – McMillan has remained in the property game and now heads Citta Property Group, which developed the building that is Google’s headquarters in Sydney.
The pub at Long Flat has a near four-hectare landholding and is about 50 kilometres west of Port Macquarie. Inside is a bar, a bistro area, a poolroom, and a small accommodation section; outside is a beer garden. The pub is next to a campground and has direct access to the Hastings River.
While the two brothers have been busy with their own corporate pursuits, McMillan said he had thought about purchasing the pub for quite some time, and the opportunity had finally come up.
“I’m an architect by training, and so I want to just tweak it a little bit,” he said. “We’ve got ambitions to make it, to not change it, but to make it better.”
On the sell side is Flower Hotels, headed by publican Alistair Flower, who has owned and operated the country pub since 2021. He has several venues across NSW, including Tacking Point Tavern in Port Macquarie, which was purchased jointly with the Laundy family in 2022 for $47 million – one of the biggest pub transactions that year.
“We’ve enjoyed our time repositioning this wonderful unique pub offering and also being part of the amazing Long Flat community,” Flower said. “We are pleased to be able to hand this over to Steve and Scott who I have no doubt will grow and develop this iconic pub even further.”
Brokering the sale was JLL’s Greg Jeloudev, who said the Long Flat pub transaction was evidence of a “very strong” pub market.
“Just look at the venues that are transacting, they’re in diminishing supply,” he said. “From an investment point of view, you’ve got high barriers to entry. You need operational expertise. So certainly, it still is very much a supply-starved market at the moment.”
McMillan was a driving force behind a revival in Australia’s development sector and the region through the second half 1990s, leading Lendlease projects such as Olympic Village, Aurora Place, Darling Park and Jackson’s Landing in Sydney. He has also been a non-executive director of Mirvac and head of Singapore’s largest development group, CapitaLand’s residential arm.
In February this year, McMillan and his wife Emilia sold their home in Mosman, on Sydney’s lower north shore, for about $23 million. The pair had built the property in 2008 and fully refurbished it in 2018.
His brother, Scott McMillan, stepped down as joint managing director of one of Australia’s biggest aviation services companies, Alliance Aviation, in late November. He founded the firm about 24 years ago.
