Harbig family sells Carnegie Officeworks site for a reported $17m

The Harbig family has sold its Officeworks-leased property at 1048-1054 Dandenong Road, Carnegie, for a price speculated at close to $17 million, realestatesource reported on 16 October. The sale ends the family’s 27-year hold on the site, about 12km south-east of Melbourne’s CBD. The buyer is another local private investor, who was not named in the report.

Why it matters

The sale closes out one of Carnegie’s longer-held commercial holdings and hands a new owner a site carrying both an income-producing lease and a marketed redevelopment case. Agents Steven Lerche, Stephen Bolton and Joseph Maloney of Savills ran the campaign, pitching the land’s capacity for a 16-level building of more than 200 dwellings on top of its current use as a hardware and stationery showroom. Any redevelopment along those lines would need a planning permit from Glen Eira City Council, so the buyer’s next move matters to local builders, consultants and agents.

The Carnegie Activity Precinct context matters too. The site sits near the former Glicks manufacturing plant, since redeveloped into a 10-level apartment tower, giving a new owner a built precedent for the kind of scheme the marketing campaign described. The deal also follows a comparable trade about four months earlier, when Time & Place bought the South Melbourne Officeworks on Kings Way from the De Lutis family, suggesting investor appetite for Officeworks-leased sites with redevelopment angles is not limited to this one corner of Carnegie.

For the seller, the exit ends a long hold that began well before Officeworks itself occupied the site: the showroom previously traded as a Dick Smith Powerhouse before Officeworks moved in during 2009.

The numbers

The property spans 5,163 sqm, zoned Commercial 1, with 63 metres of frontage to Dandenong Road and its eastern boundary running along the railway line. The showroom building covers 2,083 sqm. Officeworks was paying gross rent of $697,873 as at June 2026, and realestatesource put the yield at about 4.2 per cent on the speculated price. The price itself has not been confirmed. The Harbig family bought the site in March 1999 for $4.3 million, meaning the reported sale price represents close to a fourfold gain over the 27-year hold, before accounting for holding costs and improvements over that period.

What’s next

The Officeworks lease runs until October 2026, and the tenant holds a five-year option at a market-reviewed rent, so the new owner’s near-term decision is whether to renew the income stream or move toward the redevelopment case the Savills campaign was built around. realestatesource did not report any development application for the 16-level, 200-plus dwelling concept, or a timeline for one. Until an application is lodged, the site’s near-term use remains the existing Officeworks showroom under whichever lease terms the new owner and tenant settle on.

The unnamed buyer’s identity, and whether they intend to exercise the site toward its marketed density upside or continue to collect the existing rent, are the two open questions a planning application would resolve. Agents and developers watching the Carnegie corridor will be looking for whether a DA follows within the Officeworks lease’s option window, given the precinct already has one completed tower of comparable scale nearby. Our coverage of Melbourne development and deals is collected on our Melbourne market page.