The Cooee Hotel in St Georges Basin on the NSW south coast has been listed for sale as its passive owners make another exit.
Brisbane-based hotelier Michael Lucas and long-term business partner David Kennewell acquired the freehold of the pub in early 2019, with around seven months left on a lease to an operator. Kennerwell and Lucas were previously owners of Goulburn’s Hibernion Hotel and the North Nowra Tavern, but divested both.
The popular pub occupies a large 3,354sqm landholding in the main commercial and retail precinct of St Georges Basin, just two streets from the Basin or a 10-minute drive from Jervis Bay. The tenant did not continue, and the partners had to resume control.
“The Cooee Hotel is an excellent business, and we were pretty comfortable to enjoy the passive rent,” explained Lucas. “However, following a set of circumstances, we found ourselves needing to go back in and operate the pub.”
Cooee was reportedly in “desperate need” of some capex and better community engagement, and the owners were able to capitalise on its expansive catchment to achieve major improvements, while operating the business remotely, under management.
They carried out a strategic renovation, refurbishment and reconfiguration, finding a “vastly improved” business, and soon fielding unsolicited approaches to sell, courtesy of the competition for coastal assets of this nature.
The Cooee is the only hotel in a catchment of around 12,500 residents, in a precinct showing strong growth and demand drivers, seen in the Village Grove residential master planned community, almost opposite the Hotel, and the proposed Anson Street development’s 240 new apartments, behind the Hotel.
As such the business enjoys a profitable revenue mix, underpinned by one of the State’s best KENO outlets, and gaming operation with 14 machines, currently ranked #526, making it one of NSW’s strongest coastal gaming rooms (on a per machine basis).
An explosion of big-ticket and big-name acquisitions to the north and south of Sydney assure strong competition for what is a rapidly diminishing asset pool.
Lucas and Kennewell bought the pub through HTL in 2019, and are now said to be looking for north of $7 million for the revised FGC.
“We’re expecting interest upwards of this figure,” replied HTL Property’s Blake Edwards, marketing the Hotel with colleague Sam Handy.
“We anticipate a strong attraction from a range of buyers looking to secure a high-grade hotel asset like this.”
The freehold going concern of the Cooee Hotel is being sold via Expressions of Interest, closing Wednesday, 7 July.
