MA Financial’s Redcape has bought ornate, harbourside veteran the Frisco Hotel in Woolloomooloo from Queensland-based Sun Group.
The iconic, heritage-listed Frisco occupies a neat 304sqm corner lot in Sydney’s historic wharf district. It was built in 1856, largely to serve the hordes of local dock workers that toiled in the Bay.
Rising three storeys, it offers a single-service public bar, with TAB and 17 EGMs, beneath a restaurant and kitchen on the first level and six accommodation rooms on the top floor.
Redcape has been reconfiguring its portfolio, which has recently included sale of the South Terrace Hotel in Bankstown to Oscars for $54 million, and purchase of the Entrance Social Club Hotel from Thomas Hotels for $36 million.
Understood to have paid $15 million for the Frisco, the group says the offer proved too tempting.
“We simply saw the opportunity to invest in the pub and reinvigorate it with a new lease of life as too good to refuse,” Redcape CEO Chris Unger told PubTIC.
Vendor on the deal was Paul Xu‘s Queensland Hotel Investments, aka Sun Group, which had previously held hotels only in the Sunshine State.
Mid-2019 QHI paid long-time owners the Micola family circa $10 million for the Frisco freehold and operation.
QHI took a run at divestment in 2022 but did not attract the desired sale price.
The successful off-market sale now was through HTL Property’s Sam Handy and Andrew Jolliffe, who note the “exceptionally strong” investor appetite for city-fringe hospitality assets, as seen in the high-profile Public Hospitality receiver sales, and Ray Reilly’s recent divestment of the White Cockatoo in Petersham.
“Early life in Sydney centred around public houses in populous harbourside suburbs such as Woolloomooloo,” notes Jolliffe.
“As such, investors and patrons remain in equal parts drawn by the magnetism of both the robust trading history and the proud physical permanence of hotels such as the Frisco.”
