Kylie Minogue (and family) cash in on $20m office property
Kylie Minogue and her family have cashed out of a commercial office property at Hawthorn in Melbourne’s leafy inner east for nearly $20 million, as the pop princess prepares for her return to Australia.
Its new owner is South Australian retail dynamo John Charlton, the founder of Spendless Shoes, who pipped other bidders for the two adjoining office properties on Church Street.
The properties are held in investment vehicles for the Minogue family shareholders including Kylie, her parents Carol and Ron and brother Brendan.
At the top of the Church Street hill, the property comprises a smaller office segment in an older building while next door is a larger, more recently developed office block. The Minogue family acquired the property about 2007, as the new office component was being built.
The Hawthorn property went on the market in September through CBRE, in the same month Kylie Minogue sold an investment property in nearby Camberwell for $1.715 million, racking up a tidy $1.53 million gain over three decades.
After three decades in Britain, Minogue has indicated she is giving up her London base to re-establish herself in home town of Melbourne.
While the high-profile vendor raised considerable interest in the Hawthorn property, hard-nosed property investors will be just as interested in the transaction, which changed hands on a yield in the mid 4 per cent range.
It is understood the property sold at around its expected price, which was close to $20 million.
CBRE’s Scott Orchard, who brokered the Hawthorn property with colleagues, Tom Ryan and Jimmy Tat, confirmed it had sold, while declining to comment on price, the vendors or the buyer.
Mr Orchard said the Hawthorn property had been well-received in the market, generating several unconditional bids.
The sale follows another commercial transaction in nearby Burwood East, where TE Capital Partners nearly doubled the $18.08 million it spent four years ago on a three-storey office building housing Victoria’s Country Fire Authority. The buyer was a fund managed by super fund-backed investor ISPT. That $35.8 million deal was struck on a yield of just under 4.5 per cent.
Mr Orchard said both sales showed that the smaller end of the inner eastern commercial market was “tried and tested” among property investors.
“Investors have a lot of confidence in the market, with signs of resilience through leasing market activity,” he said.
Property and company filings show the buyer of the Minogues’ Hawthorn investment was John Charlton, a well-known Adelaide entrepreneur who founded the national footwear chain Spendless Shoes before eventually selling to new owners two years ago.
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