Less than a year after selling as a freehold going concern, the former Town Hall Hotel in Balmain has come to market as a mixed-use passive freehold.
Developer John Adgemis and associates bought both the Town Hall and the Swanson Hotels from Balmain Pub Group in May 2017, offering a “too good to refuse” price for the 1879 Town Hall, on a busy corner of Darling Street.
Mayor of (the former) Leichhardt Council, Darcy Byrne, became involved with a groundswell against the demise of pubs in the region, bemoaning that the developers planned to convert it from a pub to a medical centre.
“… keep Balmain and Rozelle as the greatest puburbs [sic] in Australia,” he said.
Parties involved with Adgemis’ Eastern Property Alliance assured PubTIC at the time that the building would remain a pub, although a mixed-use component would seek to optimise the valuable real estate.
But all that remains of the former pub is its bottleshop, The Booze Exchange, occupying tenanted space beside corporate clients and an outlet for US-based gym Orange Theory, and associated business Massage Envy.
The fully leased site sadly better represents the needs of the unique Balmain peninsula demographic, which has seen many of its yesteryear pubs close, unable to survive, without the underlying sustenance of gaming, in a lacklustre precinct no longer occupied by its ancestral working class.
The 445sqm block and landmark two-storey pub sold for $8.5 million. Marketing the property, Colliers International and Gunning Real Estate note net income of $730k, and have price expectations for the passive asset north of $13 million.
