Major community and disabled services organisation Yooralla is submitting its “Benalla Farm” for auction as the organisation brings together its services at the refurbished and larger Benalla Community Hub on Mansfield Road.
Yooralla’s 16.19 hectares, (40 acres) Benalla Farm, with over 1200 square metres of buildings, is a special type of property which you rarely see on the market. On the western side of Sydney Road the land has front and rear frontages of approx. 200 metres by a depth of approx. 800 metres
Foremost amongst the improvements are the buildings which are four steel framed and clad structures each built to meet a defined purpose together with all the usual services. These include town water, power, gas and with a licence to take water from a Goulburn Murray Water channel.
It is the existing infrastructure and facilities that will appeal to a purchaser.
- Elders selling agent Michael Everard
The buildings include a machinery shed of 580 square metres on the ground floor and with a further 145 metres as a mezzanine level. The stock shed and outdoor classroom is an industrial style building with three open bays and one that is enclosed and has two roller doors with a building area of 180 square metres. The hay shed is a clear span structure open on three sides, and there is the storage shelter and storeroom, including a kitchen with a wood fired pizza oven.
The property is pastured and well fenced into several paddocks with a reticulated trough system providing stock water.
There is also a large dam, a wetlands area, while two orchard plantings include an established, two-hectare block of pistachio nuts and about 200 olive trees as the farm was also used as the base for Yooralla’s gardening and maintenance crew and provided employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
The property is held under a Special Use zoning, but enquiries indicate the local Council will consider a range of future uses for this holding which is on the edge of an expanding commercial activity zone.
Elders selling agent Michael Everard says there is a real opportunity here with the existing buildings and infrastructure suited to a multiplicity of uses and the property may also appeal to a hobby farmer, social or other community or education or provider.
“Yooralla established their Benalla Farm to achieve a broad range of employment, skills training, recreation and group activities and to encourage users to connect with nature, to meet other people and to participate in the local community,” Mr Everard said.
“I am reluctant to put a price expectation on the likely auction outcome except to say that Yooralla is ready to relinquish their ownership as they bring services together at the Community Hub site on the Mansfield Road Benalla.
“I am sure there is a buyer who will immediately recognise the capital that has been invested here together with the ideal main road location and land size.”
