The Punthill Tuggeranong offers residential-like accommodation in Canberra’s south. Photos: Veriu Group.
A new boutique hotel pitched at corporate travellers is filling an accommodation void in Canberra’s south, particularly with the closure at the end of the year of the Abode in Tuggeranong.
Veriu Group officially launched its first Punthill hotel in the ACT last night (27 November) at 210 Anketell Street in the heart of the Tuggeranong Town Centre at Greenway.
The third site to open under the Punthill banner, the 76-room hotel is also the group’s first office conversion project, transforming the former Tuggeranong Innovation Centre Office Precinct into a stylish and contemporary apartment hotel.
Veriu is embracing the opportunity to transform underutilised office spaces in the post-COVID era into vibrant accommodation hubs.
The hotel feeds a growing demand for self-catered accommodation. It offers options from studios to three-bedroom apartments, and each one features a fully equipped kitchen, smart TV, dedicated workspace with high-speed internet, in-room laundry, and secure on-site parking.
Veriu Group CEO Zed Sanjana told Region that beyond Woden, there was very little hotel accommodation in the south, especially for the corporate and public service traveller on project work in town for a three to five-night stay and desiring more residential-like accommodation.
With nearby Services Australia a customer and the Abode closing to be sold as residential apartments, Greenway offered an opportunity to establish a bridgehead in Canberra.
The group plans to roll out close to 80 hotels nationally, and Mr Sanjana said some of those would be in other Canberra locations such as Civic, Woden and Belconnen.
“We expect by the time we finish our rollout to have hopefully a presence in Canberra of between three and five hotels ideally,” Mr Sanjana said.
The attraction of converting office space was that it was cheaper than constructing a whole new building, and with post-COVID work arrangements, there was more vacant older stock around that struggled to compete with newer A-grade buildings.
Mr Sanjana said Veriu had about six or seven such projects in the pipeline, which only amounted to about 10 per cent overall, but it was still a much bigger component than pre-COVID.
He added that more could be done if governments and councils could be more flexible with building codes and planning rules.
Mr Sanjana said applying new building standards for things such as energy efficiency to conversions could negate any cost-savings that could be made.
“Not to say that today’s requirements aren’t important, but I think it’s probably more around how can we look at some performance solution alternatives to just merely saying it needs to be the way it is for a new build, which sometimes isn’t that practical or cost-effective,” he said.
For office building owners, like the Greenway landlord, adaptive reuse or conversion offered the prospect of alternative, long-term tenancies.
“I guess the landlord saw the opportunity to be able to have a consolidated long-term tenant for the majority of the building who’s able to sort of pay a fixed-rental return for them,” Mr Sanjana said.
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