Publican Matt Coleman has executed a sale and leaseback on his Post Office Hotel in Forbes, as part of the further expansion of GDM Hotels, which includes purchase of Stockton’s Boatrowers Hotel.
The historic Post Office was built 1864 and occupies a 670sqm high-profile corner block in Forbes – a town of circa 8,500 people, around five hours’ drive west of Sydney.
Coleman has owned it since late 2016, and listed it last November as a freehold going concern, looking for $2.7 million, or as a leasehold. Sales literature cited weekly revenue of close to $30k across departments.
GDM Hotels is a partnership between Coleman and business partners Dylan Davie and George Wright, who together held leases at the Imperial Hotel in Armidale and both the Metropolitan and Tattersalls hotels in West Wyalong.
The group then took on operations at the Boatrowers Hotel, in Stockton, and Coleman and Davie juggled alternate weeks managing it, the Imperial and Post Office, while Wright steered the ships in West Wyalong.
The campaign to sell the Post Office produced an offer from a private Sydney investor to buy the freehold, for a price not disclosed, facilitating a fifth lease into the group operation.
Davie suggests they are at their current capacity and will be comfortable building on their laurels for a while before the next step.
“We’ll keep ticking this along for the next two or three years and hopefully we might end up with a freehold ourselves, or find another pub,” he offers.
Sales of the Post Office freehold and Boatrowers lease were through Manenti Quinlan’s Leonard Bongiovanni and Jeremy Cusack, who suggest it was a greater result than originally planned.
“The fact that Matt gets to continue to operate the venue means he can continue to serve a community he holds in high regard, for many years to come,” notes Bongiovanni.
