Quest Serviced Apartments has launched a new dedicated business division, Quest Properties, to help facilitate its on-going expansion plans.
Quest is seeking to increase the number of Australians directly investing in the properties it manages, to make it easier to attract developers to build new sites.
“For the past ten years, Quest has grown at a rate of eight new businesses per year and we expect this rate of growth to accelerate considerably over the next decade,” said Quest Serviced Apartments Chairman, Paul Constantinou.
“To enable this to happen, we need property developers who are prepared to build our properties, and in turn, they need investors who will purchase the end product,” he said.
Constantinou said the establishment of Quest Properties would enable this to occur more effectively.
“Currently, our investors collectively own over 5,000 individual Quest apartments. These have been sourced through a variety of channels, ranging from real estate agents and financial planners to the developers themselves. It has been unstructured and very disparate,” he said.
“This has led to a lot of confusion about the nature of serviced apartment investments and how our own Quest product fits in.
“Quest investments are really in a class of their own. They look and feel like a residential investment, without the typical frustrations like vacancies, repair and maintenance obligations, body corporate charges and real estate agent/management fees.
“The establishment of Quest Properties allows us to wrestle back control and set the record straight on a lot of the misinformation out there in the market place,” he said.
Constantinou said Quest Properties would strive to educate the investment community as to the opportunity that exists to generate strong, stable revenues as well as achieve capital growth.
He said it will also provide investors with a single point of contact for all their queries, and a trusted source of information about the Quest investment product and serviced apartment industry.
“Over our 24 years of operation, we have struck upon an incredibly successful business model which aims to allow all our stakeholders to share in our success – from our franchisees, to property developers to individual investors,” Constantinou said.
“We are at the tipping point now where in order to grow at the rate required to meet corporate demand for our product we need a dedicated division to facilitate new investment in our business,” he said.
The Quest Properties division will comprise a team of dedicated property sales and investor relations advisors who will provide new investors with a trusted source of information about the Quest product and serviced apartment industry.
Quest Properties offer a fixed 6.5% income return plus capital growth, no management fees and maintenance is managed by Quest.
“We partner with our corporate clients and property developers to identify locations where our product is in demand. We go where our corporate clients need us long-term and that’s based on the growth of industry, not projects and not leisure tourism,” he said.
“We’ve got a strong track record of building successful businesses in locations where there is high demand for our product, so our investors can feel a great deal of comfort in that.
“We are so committed to our corporate customers and our ability to select solid locations that we sign a 25 year lease – there’s real security in that for our investors,” Constantinou said.
The first new release of Quest Properties investments includes four existing Quest properties: Quest Maitland (NSW), Quest Albury (NSW), Quest Launceston (Tas) and Quest Mooney Valley (Vic), while opportunities to invest in green field properties would come online in the future.
“We’re offering people the opportunity to grow their wealth through the growth of our business and our commitment to corporate Australia,” he said.