By Gerelyn Terzo, Global AgInvesting Media
Melbourne, Australia-based natural capital investment firm Kilter Rural is striking while the iron is hot. The firm has listed the Oomabah Riverina, a collection of five farming properties located in the Southern Riverina region of New South Wales, Australia. Kilter acquired the property in recent years through Kilter Agriculture, a fund that was launched in 2023 targeting institutional scale farmland in the Southern New South Wales Riverina. The it was assembled between February 2023 and February 2024.
Spanning 7,210 hectares (17,816 acres) across the New South Wales Southern Riverina region, Oomabah Riverina is a cropping and grazing assembled by Kilter Rural in the 12 months leading up to February 2024. Kilter is fetching a cool A$60 million (US$39.2 million) for the asset and revealed to GAI News that it has indeed received interest already.
The Oomabah Riverina has its roots with the Scott family, who oversaw the farming aggregation for five generations. In 2022, the Scott family listed the entire Aratula Aggregation, which included the Oomabah property, with an estimated price tag of A$40 million (US$26.1 million), according to reports. The Oomabah property has a history of highly-productive acreage for mixed farming, including both dryland cropping and grazing.
Kilter Rural, which is 50 percent owned by Regal Funds Management, is selling this collection of five properties it architected over a one-year stretch as a development opportunity amid the confirmed unwinding of its ag fund. While Kilter Rural has no immediate plans for a new ag fund, GAI News has learned that Kilter is currently in the process of launching a USD Feeder Fund for its Kilter Water Fund with plans to go live in July 2025.
Launched in 2023 with a A$500 million (US$326.9 million) target, the Kilter Ag Fund recently offloaded the majority of its 1,858-hectare KAF Portfolio in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley. According to Lawd, which brought that asset to market a year ago, a cohort of eight properties there returned over A$13 million, with the remaining four properties yet to be sold.
Kilter Rural Chief Investment Officer Euan Friday commented on the timing of the Oomabah Riveria listing, telling AFR, “A variety of factors led us to consider it was a good value creation opportunity. We felt it would respond to management practices focused on building soil function and putting together an aggregation of this scale. It’s something not often achievable.”
The Oomabah Aggregation boasts a diverse landscape, featuring 484 hectares of irrigated cropping land, a vast 5,086 hectares dedicated to dryland cropping and another 142 hectares suitable for grazing. Colliers director Duncan McCulloch, who is part of the team handling the sale, told AFR that the property could benefit further from additional investments in water infrastructure given its “strategic location relative to the Murray River and Murray Irrigation Limited combined with favorable climatic conditions,” which create the potential for greater irrigation development, he added.
The Oomabah Aggregation is also strategically positioned to capitalize on strengthening demand for food and fiber, offering a compelling value proposition compared to many larger farmland assets further north in NSW, according to Kilter’s Friday. “We identified that land in this particular part of NSW we felt was undervalued on a productive capacity basis in terms of dollars per hectare. You only have to go 20-30 kilometers in any direction and you’d find the prices would be 20-30 percent higher,” he further commented to AFR.
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