The Albury Centrelink building has changed hands for a multimillion dollar sum. Picture: TARA GOONAN
ONE of Albury’s busiest government offices, the Centrelink headquarters at 430 Wilson Street, has been sold for a figure believed to be $6 million to $7 million.
The sale, to an unidentified capital city-based investor, comes almost three years after it was passed in at auction in April 2010, on a $6.8 million vendor’s bid by owners Regional Holdings.
Centrelink and Medicare have a seven-year lease, which expires in August 2016 and they pay $603,750 a year.
Public servants hand-ling welfare payments and issues moved into the new building in October 2009, abandoning offices in Townsend Street, now earmarked for Quest Apartments.
The interior of the office was revamped last year at government expense to also accommodate Medicare following the closure of its Dean Street office.
The site has a chequered history.
Until the mid-1980s, the address was home to a Harvey Norman store using a former Younghusbands’ woolstore building.
The Albury council bought the store from Harvey Norman in 2006 as part of a deal in which the council sold the old Borella Road dog track to develop a new Harvey Norman centre.
The council then on-sold the Wilson Street site to Regional Holdings, then known as Trebd, for $2.2 million.
After that deal was finalised in 2008, Trebd demolished the old store and built the tailor-made office for Centrelink, including an underground car park for 40 staff cars but none for Centrelink clients.
Regional Holdings continued to own the balance of the Harvey Norman site facing Macauley Street, hoping to build a four-level office, but this never eventuated.