Woollahra’s Light Brigade Hotel for sale at $20m
The imposing Light Brigade Hotel at the top of Sydney’s Oxford Street on the border of Paddington and Woollahra has been put on the market for the first time since 2015 and is expected to sell for about $20 million.
It’s being offered for sale by veteran publicans the Bayfield family, who paid about $9 million for the pub and business seven years ago and then spent another $5 million on improving the venue.
This included adding a new rooftop bar, which given the pub’s elevated location, offers some of the city’s best views.
Spanning three levels, the hotel on the corner of Oxford Street and Jersey Road dates back to the 1880s, but has a more modern Art Deco facade. It includes a bar on the ground level, a bistro on the first floor, a cocktail bar and lounge on the second floor and the rooftop bar, which sits 83 metres above sea level.
The hotel is being offered for sale by HTL Property’s Andrew Jolliffe, Dan Dragicevich and Sam Handy.
Mr Jolliffe said the hotel had been put on the market following many unsolicited approaches.
Given its strong trading record, long history and several venues, Mr Jolliffe said he expected interest from local, interstate and international buyers.
Deals pick up
The Light Brigade Hotel comes on the market as transaction activity in the pub sector picks up, including a swath of institutional and corporate investors pouring capital into pub groups.
Last month, the nation’s biggest pub investor, Charter Hall, paid just under $100 million for a 15 per cent stake in ASX-listed landlord Hotel Property Investments and in August, private equity firm PAG acquired a controlling stake in the country’s second-biggest operator Australian Venue Co for about $1.4 billion.
On the real estate front, the unlisted Redcape Hotel Group sold the Crescent Hotel in Fairfield in Western Sydney for $48 million to veteran publican Patrick Gallagher (and unfroze its fund) while purchasing the leasehold to the Criterion Hotel in the Sydney CBD for about $22 million from Mr Gallagher.
Other noteworthy deals include rising hospitality star Glenn Piper buying the Scarborough Hotel on NSW’s south coast from billionaire Bruce Gordon for $9.5 million and pub fund Harvest Hotels acquiring the Queanbeyan-based Jerrabomberra Hotel for more than $24 million.
The Light Brigade Hotel’s vendors, the Bayfield family, struck gold in 2015 when they sold the Newport Arms Hotel in Pittwater, on Sydney’s northern beaches for about $50 million to Sydney pub tsar Justin Hemmes.
The Bayfield Hotels Group operates two other hotels on the Northern Beaches – the Dee Why Hotel and The Belrose Hotel – as well as a liquor retailing arm.
The business was founded more than 40 years ago by the late Neville Bayfield, who passed away in 2012. It’s led now by his sons Mark and Wayne Bayfield.
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