A publican involved in the record-breaking acquisition of the Thomas Blamey Hotel in Wagga Wagga has purchased of the Tourist Hotel in Queanbeyan – the town’s first pub sale in a decade.

The freehold going concern hotel features a bar, bistro, beer garden, outdoor gaming room, 18 first-floor accommodation rooms and a manager’s unit. It is set upon a 1,928 sqm block of land, with a pedestrian thoroughfare running adjacent the pub and which feeds directly into a large council car park with over 200 spaces.

Also included in the sale are 16 valuable gaming machine entitlements and a 3am liquor licence.

Blake Edwards and Dan Dragicevich of HTL Property, who managed the off-market sale, said the buyer is an “undisclosed purchaser is a Maitland-based publican, who has recently purchased the Manning River Hotel in Taree and Thomas Blamey Tavern in Wagga Wagga though HTL”.

The Manning River Hotel was bought for about $20 million last month by a syndicate of NSW publicans headed by Newcastle’s Nick Quinn and including Sean O’Hara and Mick Malloy. The circa $27 million sale of the Thomas Blamey Hotel acquisition set a new record for regional pubs, with a consortium featuring prominent publicans Arthur and son Stu Laundy, Lee Green, Sam Cruikshank and O’Hara on the buy-side.

“Queanbeyan is a particularly desirable pub locality due to its large population, and comparatively low number of pubs,” the agents said. Neighbouring Canberra has no pubs operating with gaming machines.

Edwards said Queanbeyan is a “patently high performing gaming area and the pubs are commensurately tightly held”.

The Canberra-Queanbeyan statistical area has one of the highest incomes per capita in the country due to the large component of government employees.