THE Hurricane Hill Quarry at Culcairn, about 50 kilometres north of Albury, has sold at auction for $4.5 million.
The buyer, Tranternet Pty Ltd, proposes to hold the property as a long term investment.
Ruralco Property’s state manager for real estate Mike Everard auctioned the quarry. He had estimated it would sell for between $3m and $4m.
The property is based on a reserve of rhyodacite rock estimated at an unquarried resource of about nine million tonnes with recent annual production volumes of about 250,000 tonnes and a permitted expansion up to 750,000t.
The quarry has operated on the site for about eighty years with building material supplier Boral having acquired the operating licence about twenty years ago. A member of the Boral Group currently holds the operating licence which has about twelve years to run.
“The royalty paid by Boral on a per tonne mined or quarried basis will therefore flow to the new owner as a return on investment,” Mr Everard said.
The auction concludes a family inheritance matter on behalf of a descendant of the original family that has owned the freehold property for many generations.
“It was certainly one of the more unusual properties I have been called upon to auction,” he said.
The site includes 110 hectares of freehold land, part of which has been cropped or used for dryland grazing.
