The Lubec family’s prominent Horsley Park Tavern in Sydney’s greater west is being sold for the first time since its inception.
The late Valentine Lubec was born in the former Yugoslavia and emigrated to Australia. He and his wife Karen took up residence in Horsley Park, when it was largely farming land.
A chance meeting with a beer baron brought Valentine to decide on building his own pub – literally, from the ground up, laying around 200k bricks himself.
In 1980 the new large-format Tavern opened on a 10,500sqm rectangular corner site. The old school pub provides a main bar with pool tables, TAB and sports on TVs, which sometimes hosts live music, a gaming room with 15 machines and “hearty pub meals” in the bistro.
Sydney’s immutable spread west has morphed Horsley Park into one of Australia’s most prolific urban and infrastructure growth corridors.
The HPT keeps an exclusive catchment west of the M7 and will be the closest trading hotel to the new Western Sydney Airport, due to open in 2026.
Located in Fairfield LGA – the strongest performing area LGA in NSW for gaming, with all venues ranked in the Top200 – the Tavern has immediate appeal due to the lack of available hotels in the region, but its huge commercial landholding, half of which is undeveloped, is also likely to attract a lot of interest.
Sources suggest the hotel is likely to fetch circa $20 million.
The Tavern became a stalwart of the ‘burb and its creator revered for decades as a publican and a “doer” but sadly, Valentine passed away mid-2024.
The Lubec family have now listed the legacy asset, through HTL Property’s Dan Dragicevich and Andrew Jolliffe, who note the “entrepreneurial spirit” behind quintessentially Australian pubs and the ongoing appeal of under-developed freeholds.
“Transactional volumes are up dramatically compared to the same time period last year, and the market is hugely attracted to scalable, improvable assets such as this one,” offers Jolliffe.
Sale of the freehold going concern of the Horsley Park Tavern is via Expressions of Interest, closing Wednesday, 26 November.
