Ashton Waugh has topped a list of bidders competing for Waterloo’s Grosvenor, taking the city-fringe pub for circa $8.5 million.
Having purchased it from Riversdale in 2010, former CCA executive Denis Hickey and business partner Warwick Negus sold it for $5.3 million in 2017 to an overseas investor, who has had it running under management ever since.
It now joins Waugh’s diverse Watering Hole Hotels portfolio, counting operations at Ettalong Beach, Richmond, Tamworth and more recently Potts Point, at the New Hampton Hotel.
“An inner-city pub like this is not easy to come by anymore,” he says.
Located on a 304sqm corner of Phillip Street, only two blocks from Redfern Oval, home of the Rabbitohs, it is adjacent to the proposed Elizabeth Street housing master planned community, and will certainly benefit from the 3,000 new dwellings slated for the nearby $22 billion Waterloo Estate.
The Grosvenor offers public bar, bistro, gaming room with 12 machines, and eight accommodation rooms, with a midnight liquor licence and early opener flexibility.
“It’s quite run down,” notes Waugh. “We’ll try to open it up a bit, spend a bit of money … show it a bit of care; even a paint and new carpet would do it wonders.”
Laundy Hotels and W. Short Group are styling on-point offerings for the increasingly gentrified area, but Waugh feels the Grosvenor is not quite at that stage, and suits the market for a more traditional offering.
“I’ll probably do a good suburban sports bar, with decent TV to watch the Rabbitohs and have a cold schooner.
“I think there’s only up for the area and upside for the pub.”
The Grosvenor is the latest in a string of city-fringe hotel transactions in the past nine months, also including Arthur Laundy’s purchase of Redfern’s Woolpack Hotel, Adgemis buying the Strand Hotel Darlinghurst, a newcomer into the Hotel Hollywood Surry Hills, and Wayne Group taking O’Malley’s Hotel Woolloomooloo.
The Grosvenor was similarly brokered by HTL Property, through Blake Edwards and Sam Handy.
“The Waterloo catchment is set to undergo an exciting transformation over the next 10-20 years, and potential buyers were motivated and deliberate about securing a trading platform so close to so many large-scale urban renewal projects,” offered Edwards.
