Coles Exit Frees Up Warehouse Size of 10 Footy Fields

A Western Sydney warehouse vacanted when a supermarket giant moved to its new automated distribution centre is looking for a tenant.

The warehouse, the size of 10 football fields and under one roof, is the largest space in Australia available now, according to the agent handling the lease.

It is the first time the 74,000sq m distribution facility at 10 Roberts Road, Eastern Creek, has been vacant since it opened in 2008.

Coles, the only tenant to occupy the facility, vacanted when its new automated distribution centre, also in western Sydney, opened this month. That facility encompasses an area equivalent to 25 football fields and is part of a $1-billion investment in logistics by the retailer. It has opened a similar automated centre in Queensland.

Meanwhile, the Roberts Road facility offers full drive-around access, versatile loading options, ample height clearance, office space, substantial power supply, extensive onsite parking and a fully racked interior, according to JLL head of logistics and industrial, brokerage Greg Pike, who is handling the campaign.

“It’s the largest single warehouse vacancy available in Australia at the moment, and it provides major corporate and 3PL occupiers certainty in their ability to access big-box space without delivery risk,” Pike said.

He said the warehouse would be available from early 2025 and could accommodate tenants from 20,000sq m to 74,735 square metres.

The site’s availability would inject much needed quality distribution space into the Western Sydney warehouse market, Pike said, which had been constrained due to planning and infrastructure delays to developable land in the Kemps Creek precinct.

▲ Inside the Roberts Road warehouse at Eastern Creek.

“After a prolonged period of record-low vacancy, we are finally starting to see major, high-quality big box logistics assets hit the market for lease, offering occupiers some relief from rapidly rising rents and squeezed supply chain footprints,” Pike said.

He said such large-scale facilities becoming available would allow tenants of scale to skip the development queue and secure big box footprints “with no delivery risk in Australia’s most competitive industrial marketplace”.

In May, JLL reported that stubbornly high interest rates, a far-from-clear economic outlook and a shortage of assets coming to market had failed to dent Australia’s industrial and logistics sector.

According to its figures, investor capital was continuing to flow into the country’s two biggest industrial markets—Sydney and Melbourne—reflecting the resilience of the sector, JLL said.

In its report released late May, JLL said $2.47 billion of logistics and industrial market transactions were recorded in the first quarter of this year, the fourth quarterly increase in a row. It represented the strongest quarterly figure since mid-2022.