Billionaire Roosters chairman Nick Politis and partners have sold the Treetops Tavern to an Australian-Chinese Queensland-based pub group for the highest price paid in the state.
Set on a prominent 7,000sqm site in the Gold Coast’s Burleigh Waters, the Treetops consists of a public bar, lounge bar, bistro, gaming operation with 45 authorities, a large onsite drive-through liquor barn and a satellite bottleshop.
In 2016 a syndicate of three investors led by Politis and well-known hotelier Peter Ashelford snapped up the Tavern for $20 million from Thomas Hotels.
Just shy of a decade later the group, known as SEQ Hospitality, has offloaded it to Sun Treetops Tavern P/L, under Queensland Hotel Investments, aka Sun Group, directed by Paul Jian-Bo Xu, David Lai, JIan Feng Li and Xiao Sun.
Sun Group has paid a reported $50 million, OLGR approval pending, for the well-known Gold Coast pub.
The Group already holds Queensland pubs the Arundel Tavern and both the Helensvale Tavern and Saltwater Creek Hotel in Helensvale, as well as the Frisco Hotel in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, acquired in 2019.
Treetops is understood to be the highest price ever paid for a Queensland pub, following SEQ’s record-setting 2025 purchase of one of the state’s most iconic pubs, the Caxton Hotel, for close to $50 million.
Contrary to this divestment, SEQ has been building a portfolio in southeast Queensland, counting a total of eight hotels and 20 bottleshops, notably including the successful acquisition of listed publican landlord Eumundi Group early last year.
HTL Property’s Andrew Jolliffe brokered the off-market sale, offering that he expects “other sales to mimic these elevated price points” in a city seeing an Olympics-led economic boom.
“Generational assets such as the Treetops Tavern are seldom available to acquire; so when they are, frankly, they demand an applicable premium.”
Jolliffe also suggests the liquidity available to investors is driving hotel sales nationally as they approach $2bn for the financial year, in what is still a largely fragmented asset class.
“Nothing restricts value growth like an illiquid market, and history has shown the intrinsic financial benefits regarding both the prevalence and consistency of an equal number of willing buyers and sellers.”
