Land lease giant GemLife eyes $700m-plus IPO at $2b val; roadshow on
While everyone holds their breath for Virgin’s $4 billion float to take off, another multibillion-dollar IPO hopeful is quietly marching ahead with its ASX debut.
Street Talk can reveal GemLife, the land lease communities giant owned by Queensland’s Puljich family and Thakral Capital, this week told fund managers to think about a $700 million-plus raising at a circa $2 billion valuation that could launch in the coming weeks.
Sources said GemLife’s bankers, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Highbury Partnership, took about two dozen fund managers through four sites in Queensland on Monday and Tuesday, ahead of a non-deal roadshow planned for Asia next week.
They added GemLife is preparing to mail out preliminary financials to prospective IPO backers within days. It is said to be hoping to sneak in a June bookbuild for a July float, although a final decision – including on the timeline or pricing – is yet to be made.
GemLife has been pitched as Australia’s largest privately owned land lease developer, owner and operator, with nearly 10,000 homes at 30-plus communities across Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Its run at the ASX boards comes after it tested buyer appetite in 2022, but didn’t sign a deal despite receiving interest from the country’s largest superannuation fund AustralianSuper.
It is vying for a place in listed equities investors’ portfolios at a time when the housing affordability crisis has spiked pre-retirees’ and retirees’ interest in land lease communities – where they buy a house but lease the underlying land from an operator like GemLife – over the traditional and more expensive alternative of paying for a retirement home in a community.
Investor money has followed suit, as deal makers play twin themes of ageing population and declining housing affordability, alongside an annuity-style return stream and potentially double-digit returns.
Potential investors have been asked to compare GemLife to ASX-listed rival Ingenia, which trades at about 16-times price-to-earnings ratio and a $3 billion enterprise valuation. Lifestyle Communities is the only listed pure play land lease business and has been trading at more than 20-times.
GemLife’s IPO plans were first revealed by this column. It is among the biggest IPO candidates for 2025, alongside Virgin Australia, Dexus’ infrastructure funds, and TPG Capital’s $3.75 billion pets and vets business Greencross. Dual-track candidates include Fonterra’s dairy business and Brookfield’s La Trobe Financial.
Only two of these, Virgin and GemLife, are expected to attempt a listing by the end of this financial year.
