Computer Giant Sells Melbourne Campus Building for $88 million

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has sold its Melbourne campus site at Forest Hill on a tight yield of just 3.6 per cent.

The computing heavyweight put its Melbourne and Sydney campus sites on the market late in 2017 to unleash the value of underutilised assets and put more investment back into the business.

The sale represented a yield of 3.6 per cent and was sold to a local developer-investor group with ties to China.

[Related reading: Hewlett Packard Unlocks Sites to Spark Development]

HP’s 5.68-hectare site at 353-383 Burwood Highway is a prime Commercial 1 zone mixed development opportunity.

On listing the property, Hewlett Packard was seeking to take a partial leaseback over the existing office building on the site, which has a net lettable area of 9,523 square metres. It offers substantial dual street frontages to Burwood Highway and Springvale Road, totalling nearly 500 metres.

The sale was negotiated by Julian White, Mark Wizel, Lewis Tong, Scott Orchard and Kiran Pillai from CBRE.

CBRE's Julian White said the site represented one of the largest and most significant landholdings in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

“The scale of the property will appeal to major private and institutional developers, both locally and throughout Asia, underpinned by its proximity to outstanding retail amenity, educational institutions and public transport,” White said.

In Sydney at the 3.43-hectare Rhodes site, HP is seeking to partner with a leading Australian developer to rezone the property and – in the process – achieve mutual benefits through a forecast uplift in the site’s development potential and value.

Expectations were that both sites could fetch in the vicinity of $180 million combined according to the Australian Finance Review.