Restaurant baron Chris Lucas flips $14m building on Flinders Lane

Lucas, through a trust company, paid $14 million for the five-level building last year. The Marriner’s price is unknown as all parties declined to return Capital Gain’s calls and emails.

Lucas also purchased No.175 next door, which houses his Kisume restaurant, for $23.5 million in 2023.

Lucas told Capital Gain last year that he loved Melbourne’s historic buildings but had no great plans to be a landlord.

Before his Flinders Lane buying spree, Lucas bought up a chunk of Bourke Street – numbers 19-21, 23-29 and 27 Windsor Place at their rear – to construct his showpiece Maison Bâtard.

Packer in Trak

Orchard Piper’s new mixed-use development at 7-11a Carters Avenue in Toorak will offer 13 boutique office suites covering 2000 square metres. Two of the suites have already sold to a local family office which has paid $7.3 million.

Backed by James Packer’s investment vehicle NPACT, the development has already racked up more than $125 million in apartment presales.

Orchard Piper acquired the 3589-square-metre Mercedes-Benz dealership site for $67 million in 2022.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Oliver Hay, George Davies and Raphael Favas and Colliers agents Ben Baines, Matt Knox and Xavier Nguyen are handling sales.

The new office space follows the successful sale of all the strata office at Orchard Piper’s 420 Toorak Road, which reaped a total $20 million while setting record of $18,000 per square metre.

Sports walk

Global sports retailing brand Lacoste has snared space on Little Collins Street at the rear of the revamped Melbourne Walk arcade on Bourke Street Mall.

The 190-square-metre flagship store amalgamates two shopfronts on the trendy strip and makes a welcome third announcement for the new arcade.

While JD Sports and Popmart have already opened flagship stores on the mall, much of the internal space remains empty.

Given its Union Lane entrance faces the sparkle and colour of Mecca’s flagship store next door, it all looks a bit quiet.

Colliers’ retail leasing executive Ruby Koop, who negotiated the deal with Tom Larwill, said more announcements were expected in the new year.

The arcade is at the foot of the recently completed InterContinental Hotel Group’s first Australian dual-branded hotels, the Holiday Inn and Indigo Hotel.

Buchan designed the $400 million project, which includes 452 rooms and 6000 sq m of retail over three levels.

It faces the rear of Collins Arcade which is poised to open soon after a much-needed revamp. Signs indicate Kathmandu is poised to open on its Little Collins Street frontage.

Ainsworth Property’s Zelman Ainsworth is leasing out that project, but declined to confirm the Kathmandu news.

However, he provided some guidance on average rents in the precinct – between $2000-2200 a square metre, depending on size for Little Collins and $9000-$11,000 a square metre on the Mall.

Time & Place

Development powerhouse Time & Place has snapped up a warehouse in Clifton Hill that was flipped by self-storage group StorHub after only 18 months.

StorHub paid $13 million to the Gange family for the property. The Ganges made a motza in the pre-Uber days running the Silver Top and Astoria taxi franchises out of the building.

The 2447-sq m corner site at 24-42 Alexandra Parade is close to the Fitzroy Gasworks project and the entrance to the Eastern Freeway.

Records show Time & Place’s new entity TPL Storage Holdings No.2 slapped a caveat on the property during the week.

It looks like the company, which builds everything from office towers to housing projects, is planning a self-storage project for the site.

Earlier this year, it paid $29.3 million for 217-223 Separation Street, Northcote where it is also planning a self-storage project. It’s a good income-producing use for the land-banked sites which will be well positioned for residential developments in the future.

Cushman & Wakefield’s George Davies, Raphael Favas and Anthony Kirwan did the deal but declined to comment.

Fire sale

Two office deals have pumped nearly $50 million into the hundreds of millions of debt incurred by the Chinese-owned Australian Property Holdings.

Records show 347-351 Burwood Highway sold for $36.6 million to Forest Hill Commercial Property, an entity owned by Melbourne local Heng Yang and Sydney-based Yiqia Li.

The 2.62-hectare site has two fully leased buildings covering 10,589 sq m, an onsite childcare centre and three-level 721-bay car park. The average lease term is 4.47 years bringing in $3.37 million a year.

Lemon Baxter agents Thomas Blencowe, Paul O’Sullivan and Hans Fan, with Colliers’ Scott Orchard, Alex Browne and Ben Baines handled the deal but declined to comment.

The property’s listing price of circa $40 million, was a good 10 per cent less than its 2019 sale price of $45.85 million.

A missive from Colliers circulating this past week, looking on the bright side, noted there were twice as many buyers around since the last similar deal in the area.

It’s next door to No.358-383, the old Hewlett Packard campus which sold last year to Malaysian-government owned company MRCB Australia for about $68 million – well short of its $90 million asking price.

APH bought a swag of Melbourne properties in the past 10 years paying vastly inflated prices. When construction costs started to rise, the company’s development arm wobbled and there were no more funds to rescue the behemoth which had invested heavily in Box Hill, Forest Hill and other suburbs.

Receivers have also sold 16 Lakeside Drive at the Tally Ho business park in East Burwood for a fire sale price of just over $8 million – 38 per cent less than the $13 million APH paid in March 2022.

By the time the 2314-sq m office came back on the market in February – shortly after APH’s pre-Christmas collapse – it was for sale at about $9 million.

Stonebridge Property Group agents Julian White, Max Warren and Chao Zhang ran the campaign and declined to comment.

And this week, expressions of interest closed for a South Melbourne hotel which APH attempted to off-load last year as it tried to fend off creditors.

Selling under instructions from Korda Mentha, the 69-room hotel at 51-59 Palmerston Crescent has two mortgages held by Marshall Investments and Macquarie Bank. The latter has taken control of the property.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Daniel Wolman, Leon Ma, Oliver Hay, and HTL Property’s Scott Callow, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Jolliffe have the listing. Last year, price expectations are about $24 million.