Blue Sky offloads Gundaline Station in the Riverina
Blue Sky's cotton farm Gundaline Station has been sold for around $65 million.
The price has not been revealed, but in an announcement to the ASX on Friday, ASX-listed Blue Sky Alternatives Access Fund confirmed the price was "in line with the Alternatives Fund carrying value for the investment".
It was listed for sale late last spring through Kidder Williams.
The sale to an offshore European party was close to being finalised, The Australian first reported mid-last week, with contracts exchanged last week.
The asset sits within Blue Sky's Real Estate Assets division.
The farm, at at Carrathool off the Sturt Highway, isn one of Australia’s largest irrigation properties.
Gundaline Station is located in the highly regarded Southern Riverina region of NSW.
Dutch-based Optifarm, a fund backed by high net worth European investors, bought it from Blue Sky, the Dutch government pension fund ABP and Singapore-based asset manager Duxton.
Optifarm's acquisition of Gundaline Station followed its earlier purchases this month of Jemalong Station and Jemalong Citrus at Forbes in the NSW Central West region from the Kahlbetzer family's Twynam Agricultural Group.
Fronting the Murrumbidgee River in NSW, the 15,000 hectare Gundaline property suited to growing a combination of irrigated cotton, cereals/oilseeds/legumes and permanent crops such as almonds was last sold in 2014 to the institutional investor consortium.
Over the past four years, they have more than doubled the land area under irrigation, significantly expanded and improved the water storages and irrigation infrastructure, as well as upgrading the existing irrigation land.
The property consists of more than 6,000 hectares of highly developed furrow irrigation (over 3,500 hectares of new development), with the balance comprising land suitable for development to permanent plantings and additional furrow irrigation, and grazing land.
The holding benefits from significant water entitlements.
The Australian Financial Review indicated Optifarm's directors are listed as Jelle Rienk Elzinga, managing director of Dutch-based securities trader Optiver and Michael Wheeler, a finance manager at Australian agribusiness firm Landmark.
