Macquarie's Paraway divesting parts of Hassad farm acquisition

The Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Asset (MIRA) has moved to sell parts of the portfolio picked up when nine Hassad Australia aggregations were secured last year.

The deal was estimated to have cost the investment funds about $300 million.

Hassad, part of oil-rich Qatar’s worldwide sovereign wealth investment business, had accumulated a 300,000 hectare Australian property portfolio, but quit the last of those holdings with its sell-off to Macquarie.   

Viridis Ag, MIRA's cropping enterprise, is divesting grazing land.

“These are strategic investment decisions by the two businesses,” said CBRE Agribusiness director, Col Medway, who is marketing the NSW holdings.

“The decision to sell was made because the properties just do not fit the investment mandates and long term plans of each fund, and the vendors recognise there’s keen market demand for well developed, prime quality holdings with scale.”

The listings see Paraway Pastoral offloading 16,000 hectares of dryland and irrigated property in New South Wales.

Paraway Pastroral operates large-scale sheep and cattle enterprises and has a combined landholding of more than 4.4 million hectares.

Expressions of interest for the multi-farm parcels, or individual farms, or their water entitlements are sought by March 7.

The combined Laura Downs and Paddys River parcels are targeting prices in the vicinity of $21 million and $17 million respectively.

The third property, Bundemar Park, is a highly productive, diverse landholding with winter grand production.

Elders real estate general manager, Tom Russo, said Viridis’ Cummins parcel was sure to attract interest from multi-generation Eyre Peninsula farming families needing to expand.

“Buyers are looking for scale,” he told The Land.

Medway said CBRE Agribusiness had a record sales year in 2018.

“You’d be surprised by just how many $10 million buys, or bigger, are being transacted by family farming businesses, and others entering into the game.”

“Each of these landholdings represent an opportunity to secure a significant landholding envied for scale, productive capacity and turnkey capability.”

“The vendor will consider offers for immediate access, following an exchange of contracts, to facilitate the establishment of the purchaser’s desired winter crop program,” Medway added.

“The flexibility of the vendor to consider offers for each aggregation as a whole or as individual properties opens up each aggregation to all sectors of the market, including neighbours, family farming businesses and institutional investors.”