Taphouse Hotel Group is shaking up the portfolio, offering up The Macca and Tacking Point Tavern coastal hotels, with expectations of a joint sale price to rival the run of recent records.
The heritage-listed Port Macquarie Hotel, known locally as The Macca, was established in 1939, making it the area’s most longstanding pub.
Occupying a 2,878sqm site immediately adjacent to the IGA-anchored Port Central Shopping Centre, it offers a classic sports bar said to be the “home of live sports screenings” in Port Macquarie, a bistro and luxurious VIP lounge, under a 2am licence, and 20 accommodation rooms upstairs.
It also incorporates the Town Green, on the same title, which is leased as a restaurant and operates under a separate licence.
Enjoying historically strong accommodation business, marketing literature specifies “diversified and growing” annual revenues in excess of $13 million, with high profitability, plus an additional $140k in rent from the Town Green Buffet & Bar.
Tacking Point Tavern is set up as a family-friendly venue, also adjacent to a major shopping centre, with sports and lounge bars featuring big-screen TVs, gaming room, and a spacious beer garden boasting Port Macquarie’s largest outdoor screen.
The pubs are located in Port Macquarie’s CBD, and in the beachside suburb of Lighthouse Beach (respectively), and both are within blocks of the Pacific Ocean.
Both pubs hold 30 gaming machines, and both have enjoyed recent renovations; a $10 million refurbishment at Tacking Point Tavern, and $3.5 million makeover of the Port Macquarie Hotel.
Between them they generate in excess of $25 million in annual revenue.
No sale price was disclosed, but in the wake of sub-seven per cent yields seen in sales at the North Nowra Tavern, the Corrimal Hotel, and Lake Macquarie Hotel, the highly profitable Taphouse pubs could well see a combined sale price of $100 million.
While Port Macquarie is further from Sydney than the others, it arguably has greater infrastructure and demand drivers pushing economic and population growth prospects, seen in the airport, hospital, university, tourism, and the large-scale residential communities, including Lewis Land Group’s Sovereign Hills mixed-use masterplan, bringing some 2,500 new dwellings, a 25,000sqm town centre and significant other facilities.
Drawn to the area, in March a Laundy-Flower partnership paid $25 million on purchase of Port Macquarie’s Mercure Central Hotel.
The Port Macquarie LGA counts more than 87k people, and only eight hotels, while the Port Macquarie Urban Area has a population of around 44k residents and only four hotels.
Taphouse Hotel Group is a subsidiary of Matsal Investments, which is part of parent company Salmat, built by Philip Salter and Peter Mattick.
The Group has been in pubs some time, although have made few acquisitions in the past decade beyond purchase of Port Macquarie Hotel and Tacking Point Tavern from Redcape, in mid-2015.
More recently they sold the Coolangatta Sands Hotel, late 2019.
Matsal has a portfolio in other commercial and mixed-use real estate, and operations based in Brisbane. Taphouse also operates the Chinderah Tavern, Kingscliff Beach Hotel, and Rydges Hotel at Port Macquarie.
The sale now, in peak market demand, is said to have been driven by the advancing years of the group shareholders, and the fact that at the end of the day the company is a developer, not a publican.
Given the region’s “hardwired” tourism dollars, and the big-ticket sales being seen in northern NSW, agents say interest for either or both properties is expected to be very high.
“There are very few hotels nationally like these two Port Macquarie hotels, and when combined with the unparalleled pace at which the North Coast region is growing – both economically and in terms of its population base – the opportunity to acquire scale is so incredibly rare,” says HTL Property’s Andrew Jolliffe, marketing the assets with colleague Dan Dragicevich.
The freehold going concerns of the Port Macquarie Hotel and Tacking Point Tavern are being sold individually or in one line, through an Expressions of Interest process concluding Wednesday, 25 May.
