Waratah accepts discount for outback pub
Darren Baker’s Waratah Group has accepted a discount for the Royal on Ninety Nine at Roma, the most populated town in outback Queensland’s Maranoa region.
Fourteen months after hitting the market, the freehold going concern is selling for c$7 million to Melbourne-based Black Rhino, directed by Deborah Mathieson-Tomsic, a daughter of billionaire pokies baron, Bruce Mathieson, and husband, David Tomsic.
Initial expectations were $8m.
HTL Property’s Glenn Price and Brent McCarthy were the agents.
The deal comes three years since HPI outlaid $3.25m for Roma’s White Bull Tavern – now leased to Australian Venue Co.
Outback pub sale
Mr Baker paid $6.4m for the Royal on Ninety Nine in November, 2020, holding it in the Waratah Hotel Fund, which has traded in these assets for two decades.
Completed eight years ago, replacing a venue destroyed by fire in 2014, it contains bars with TAB facilities, a cocktail lounge, bistro and gaming room with 18 electronic gambling machines (story continues below).
On 730 sqm at 99 McDowall Street, on the north east corner of Hawthorne, it is also licensed for footpath dining.
It derived $120,000 weekly income when it was listed including from a Subway store on a separate title next door (land to longer-term expand the licensed area and/or gaming room).
Roma is 480 kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD.
The Royal on Ninety Nine is Black Rhino’s fourth Queensland asset.
A major EGM investor too, the group now holds a total of 44 pubs, predominantly in Victoria, where it is headquartered, but also in South Australia.
Also today we are reporting the freehold going concern of the Shakespeare Hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills is selling, ending a 50 year association for the operator.
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