Infrastructure

Palisade Investment Partners adds two livestock exchanges to portfolio

Palisade’s Regional Livestock Exchanges has acquired the South Eastern and Western Victoria exchanges to take its portfolio to 10 sale yards across Australia’s eastern seaboard.

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Palisade Investment Partners, an infrastructure asset manager headquartered in Sydney, has acquired 100 percent of South Eastern Livestock Exchange and Western Victoria Livestock Exchange.

The two exchanges were privately owned and will now be brought under the banner of Regional Livestock Exchanges platform, which is owned by Palisade-managed investors and the Palisade Diversified Infrastructure Fund.

SELX is located outside Yass, New South Wales, and has been operating since 2016 with capacity to sell 3,800 cattle and 30,000 sheep on a given day. WVLX is close to Mortlake, Victoria and has capacity to sell 3,000 cattle per day.

Palisade’s RLX operates a portfolio of eight livestock sale yards across eastern Australia, and has been handling 820,000 cattle and 2.34 million sheep annually. Its existing portfolio includes the Central Queensland, Inverell, Tamworth Regional, Hunter Regional, Central Tablelands, Northern Victoria, Central Victoria and Corangamite Regional livestock exchanges.

In a statement, Palisade CEO Roger Lloyd said: “We are delighted to secure these two high-quality regional infrastructure assets, while continuing to invest in regional Australia and support the communities in which these assets operate. The enhanced geographical diversity across the portfolio due to this most recent acquisition, leads to improved risk adjusted returns for our clients.”

Brett Freer, CEO of RLX, said: “Both SELX and WVLX are highly complementary to the existing RLX portfolio. The acquisition provides RLX with the opportunity to optimize the performance of both SELX and WVLX, as well as the existing RLX portfolio through operational synergies and economies of scale.”

Palisade said its Diversified Infrastructure Fund, an open-end vehicle, has delivered a gross return of 13 percent per year to investors, including 7.7 percent of gross income, over the 10 years to December 31, 2022.

Debt financing for the deal was provided by ANZ, with Kidder Williams acting as financial adviser. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed and the deal is expected to occur in the coming weeks. Palisade Investment Partners declined to comment beyond its statement.