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Telstra is looking to offload a major site in Melbourne’s south-east where it runs its global operations centre.
The telco has put a 6.5 hectare block at 762-766 Blackburn Road up for grabs, a site worth an expected $80 million because of its strong development potential.
Telstra confirmed it was looking to sell the Clayton site, or a portion of it, through an expression of interest process.Credit:
Telstra consolidated its global operations centre in a purpose-built office on the Clayton site 23 years ago, a building where staff monitor its fixed, broadband, satellite, broadcast television, data and mobile networks in real time.
It claims the centre’s 24-hour surveillance hall is four times larger than NASA’s famous Houston space control centre.
JLL’s Josh Rutman, Jesse Radisich and Noral Wild are handling the transaction. Rutman said the Blackburn Road building is “wholly owned by Telstra and will be offered with a leaseback, providing valuable income to the successful purchaser from an ASX top 20 company.”
The offering extends a run of asset sales that the company kicked off in 2018 when it announced it would sell up to $2 billion worth of property as part of its T22 strategy under former chief executive Andy Penn.
The flow of sales slowed down during the pandemic, but Telstra nevertheless managed to slip in two major deals in 2020 when it sold its Pitt Street exchange in Sydney and offloaded a large data centre in Clayton, 25 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, to Centuria Industrial REIT for $416.7 million.
The 76-78 Pitt Street property in Sydney’s CBD sold for about $280 million on a 10-year, triple-net leaseback agreement with Telstra.
More recently it transacted a 49 per cent share of its InfraCo Towers business for $2.8 billion to a consortium made up of the Future Fund, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation and Sunsuper.