Passive investors have sent the Duck to market, billed as a prime inner-city freehold hotel in trendy Chippendale, offered with vacant possession.
Squatting on a 392sqm corner of Rose Street and Cleveland Lane, Chippendale’s Duck Inn has a reputation as a popular gastro pub, enjoying a catchment of affluent, high-density residents in the epicentre of Sydney’s premier university precinct and its 150k-plus students.
The attractive, two-storey wedge-shaped building comprises a single bar operation, commercial kitchen and polished foodservice, and a spacious, popular outdoor area – but no gaming. Upstairs there are seven pub-style accommodation rooms, accessed by a separate entrance.
Mid-2017 the Duck was sold by a syndicate of five owners to another group of passive investors, managed by Steven Quong. Well known Newtown operator Adam Kilkeary, formerly of the Coopers Arms, had been engaged in early 2016 to revive the pub’s business and relevance and continued with the new owners for a time.
In 2022 the group kicked the tyres as hospitality around the country clawed back from the pandemic. When a sale did not eventuate they installed tenants on a temporary lease.
But the Ducked operators have since left and the pub is currently not trading.
Typical of the kind of inner west hangout that thrives under hands-on curation, the Duck carries real potential to be reimagined as a destination dining and hospitality offering, and there is further opportunity in the underutilised upper level as student accommodation or a boarding house.
Underpinned by its land and building value, the city-fringe asset is expected to fetch circa $5 million.
It’s being sold via Expressions of Interest closing Tuesday, 29 September, steered by HTL Property’s Blake Edwards and Ben Kennedy.
“Found just a few kilometres from the CBD and typical of the kind of suburban pub so popular in the inner west, the Duck could be flying,” remarked Edwards.
