Balmain’s beleaguered Town Hall Hotel is back, after selling this week to a ‘restitutional’ investor as the Public Hospitality portfolio flounders.
The Town Hall Hotel was built in 1888 on a corner of arterial Darling Street, opposite the suburb’s actual Town Hall, as part of the Balmain Civic group of buildings.
In recent years it has operated as a pub, and as a mixed-use premise occupied by a massage parlour, gym and bottleshop.
Former PKMG dealmaker Jon Adgemis acquired the site in 2017 for $8 million, making Balmain Pub Group an unsolicited offer for the freehold going concern reportedly “too good to refuse”.
Less than a year later, the two-storey building on a 433sqm lot was returned to market as a mixed-use passive freehold.
In 2022 ambitious plans emerged to renovate it and Public Hospitality Group culinary ambassador Alessandro Pavoni take on a new lease to revive it as a gastropub.
Spanning three levels, with upstairs accommodation and a rooftop terrace boasting views of the Sydney CBD, the site enjoys favourable and flexible planning controls and potential (STCA).
A development application was lodged and approved, yet the former hotel has sat dormant for a number of years.
In recent months lender Latrobe Financial called in the debt and took possession, appointing receivers Joseph Hayes and Chris Johnson of Wexted Advisors, who put the asset to market in June looking to a sale price circa $8.5 million.
Sales literature pitched the property as a “veritable blank canvas” with multiple alternative-use options beyond conversion back into a pub.
This week it went to auction and sold for $9.5 million to an investor, said to bring “intentions of reactivating the site back into a trading hotel business”, in line with what was achieved at the nearby Dry Dock Hotel, which was rejuvenated and relaunched late 2023 by Peninsula Hospitality Group.
After struggles with financing and incomplete projects, Adgemis’ PHG hit existential hurdles late 2024 as creditors called in five of the group’s pubs, taking possession of Oxford House in Paddington, The Norfolk in Redfern, the Camelia Grove Hotel in Alexandria, and The Strand and unfinished Exchange Hotel in Darlinghurst.
Marketing of these assets brought about Solotel now operating the Camelia and Norfolk.
The month-long campaign on the Town Hall was through HTL Property’s Sam Handy and Andrew Jolliffe in conjunction with Colliers’ James Cowan and Matthew Meynell, and is said to have garnered “intense interest from numerous buyer segments”.
Hoteliers and investors have been attracted to the continued benefits coming from investment in infrastructure in Sydney’s inner west, bringing the Sydney Metro West, the new WestConnex M4-M5 link, and reinvigoration of the Bays Precinct.
Sale of the Town Hall is seen as significant, representing not just a high-profile PHG property to be publicly marketed and sold but a return of a decommissioned landmark of the Balmain peninsula.
Agents for the sale wouldn’t be drawn on the identity of the purchaser, but note the auction price on the vacant site exceeded that of the last three pub transactions in Balmain, being the Garry Owen Hotel for $6.5m, the London Hotel for $8.5m, and the Dry Dock Hotel for $7.5m, with HTL claiming 20 of the 22 pubs transacted in the precinct over the last fifteen years.
