Roberts’ RF Corval sells balance of GC Corporate Centre for $109m
RF Corval, the property funds platform backed by Rich Lister Andrew Roberts, has sold the balance of Gold Coast’s Corporate Centre precinct in Bundall for $109 million – the largest office transaction yet on the Gold Coast.
The City of Gold Coast purchased the Corporate Centre One building in the precinct which spans about 11,500sq m and is occupied by 37 tenants, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Findex and KPMG. It sits on about 2.26 hectares over a number of titles.
The council also bought the Wyndham building in the same precinct for $46.25 million in June 2023.
RF Corval completed more than 30,000sq m of leasing deals across the Corporate Centre precinct in its nearly eight-year ownership, after buying it from funds manager Cromwell in 2017 for $89 million. It has since divested the entire ownership.
Oliver Picone, chief investments officer at RF Corval, said generally the firm only put a syndicate of investors into an investment for five to seven years, and it had come to the end of its term, which was why it had sold the rest of the precinct.
“The Gold Coast office market, from a leasing perspective, has been relatively strong,” Picone told The Australian Financial Review. “There’s been a lack of supply coming to that market, and the market’s benefited from, I think, people moving to the Gold Coast for what it offers.
“It’s probably been a positive coming out of COVID that people have actually moved to the Gold Coast, and that’s driven demand for office space.”
CBRE agent Mark Witheriff, who managed the sale with agent Jack Morrison, said the Gold Coast office market had been strong for the last three to four years due to the amount of business coming into Queensland.
“The A-grade space is at record lows. So, I think, unlike some of our couple of capital cities, the Gold Coast is in quite a strong position across all our sectors, but particularly the office sector,” Witheriff told the Financial Review.
“It’s quite a strategic and quite a smart acquisition to acquire the whole precinct and give them [The City of Gold Coast] the opportunity for their future.”
Witheriff said Corval had been an extremely active manager of the asset over its ownership period, taking the building from carrying long term 20 to 30 per cent vacancy to being effectively fully occupied.
Another purchase by Corval was Melbourne’s Malvern office building in late 2024 for just over $18 million – 35 per cent less than its original asking price of $28 million.
