Australia Post has leased a new warehouse with the capacity to sort and send as many as 450,000 parcels every day.
The facility is next to Amazon’s mega robotics fulfilment centre, set to be the largest in the country, in the Goodman Group and Brickworks $3 billion Oakdale West Industrial Estate in Kemps Creek, near Penrith.
The 89 hectare Kemps Creek facility sits on the doorstep of the Western Sydney Aerotropolis with access to the M7 and M4 motorways.
Last month, Australia Post’s chief executive Paul Graham warned that the upcoming Christmas period will be its “busiest in history,” with delivery drivers working weekends for the rest of the year to meet demand.
Goodman Australia chief executive Jason Little says the unprecedented growth in warehousing and logistics over the last 18 months has created demand for high-quality industrial space in this pocket of Western Sydney.
“There are more than 4.4 million people with a digital spend of around $15.6 billion within an hour’s drive of the Oakdale estate, and it provides unrivalled access to this market,” he says.
Goodman received planning approval for the mega-site in 2019, which will eventually be home to Coles, Woolworths and Telstra
Knight Frank Australia’s industrial market report for the third quarter of 2021 shows investment volumes are already double the pre-pandemic high in 2019.
Director head of industrial research at Knight Frank Australia, Katy Dean says industrial stock continues to rise.
“This, in turn, is pushing some markets like Sydney’s Western precincts and Melbourne’s West and South East to a critical shortage of prime existing stock, and therefore compressing the volume of available secondary supply considerably too,” she says.
Construction on the Australia Post warehouse begins in January and is set to be completed in August next year.