The Campbellfield site was part of a Ford facility (Image: Google)
Brookfield Asset Management has agreed to acquire part of Ford Motor Company’s former Broadmeadows assembly plant complex in Melbourne’s north and plans to develop the 11-hectare (27.2-acre) site into a new industrial estate.
The brownfield site at 1731-1733 Sydney Road, Campbellfield, will be turned into a multi-unit estate across approximately 64,000 square metres (688,890 square feet) of net lettable area in partnership with Melbourne-based property developer Time & Place, which bought the property in 2025. The value of the transaction was not disclosed.
“The proposed multi-unit estate at Campbellfield will be classified as super prime upon completion and help fill a sizeable gap in Melbourne’s logistics supply,” said Ruban Kaneshamoorthy, Brookfield’s co-head of Australia real estate. “We expect to be active during the coming years in this space as we build out a A$3 billion ($2.1 billion) logistics portfolio across Australia and New Zealand.”
Brookfield is taking on the project after having filled most of the space in the first phase of a Melbourne project it took on in 2022, with the company also having announced a Sydney-area project in August.
Logistics Corridor
Connected to major arterial roads, the site benefits from access to the Port of Melbourne and Melbourne Airport, and will attract small to medium sized tenants servicing one of Australia’s most significant economic corridors, according to Brookfield.
Ruban Kaneshamoorthy of Brookfield
Future infrastructure benefits, including the Melbourne Intermodal & Industrial Exchange, owned by Aware Super and developed in partnership with Barings, in nearby Somerton, will create further efficiencies within the supply chain for Campbellfield tenants, Brookfield said.
Brookfield has already signed up at least five tenants for its first industrial park in Victoria, the Cardinia Logistics Estate in Pakenham, located about 56 kilometres southeast of Melbourne. Construction of the estate’s 50,000 square metre first stage is complete, with a further 130,000–160,000 square metres of planned space yet to be built.
Brookfield paid A$94 million for the 60/130 Greenhills Road site in 2022 and in 2024 carved out and sold a 6.2-hectare corner parcel of the Cardinia property to Costco for the retailer’s fifth Victorian warehouse.
Ballarat Food Manufacturing, a subsidiary of the Chinese business park developer Yida Group, in 2025 agreed to lease 14,660 square metres of space at the estate for its first manufacturing facility in Australia, and BCI Furniture and Pick Packers were added as tenants earlier this year.
The Campbellfield site was once part of a larger property that Ford developed starting in the late 1950s, which at its peak in 1995 covered 249,484 square metres and employed about 4,000 workers. Local production at the site ended in 2016, and the first major land parcel was sold to Pelligra Group in 2019. Pelligra, in partnership with Qualitas, is developing the land into a mixed-use industrial precinct known as Assembly Broadmeadows.
The site at 1731–1733 Sydney Road was put on the market in mid-2023 through CBRE’s Andrew Bell and Chris O’Brien with an estimated price of about A$90 million. Ford sold the property in February 2025 to Time & Place for a speculated price of A$80 million.
Aussie Shed Expansion
The purchase by Brookfield is the latest in a series of logistics acquisitions in Australia by the Toronto-based alternative investment manager. Just last month, the company announced the acquisition of a multi-unit logistics project in western Sydney, which market sources said had an expected end value of A$225 million.
Brookfield will develop the Cornerstone Logistics Estate within the Nepean Business Park in Penrith in conjunction with Australian family office Precinct Capital, which owns the park. It will provide 47,000 square metres of space across 13 warehouses once completed in mid-2027.
The Cornerstone purchase increased Brookfield’s Australia and New Zealand logistics platform to 10 investments comprising 850,000 square metres of operating or planned warehouse space across Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, the company said last month.
Earlier this year, Brookfield teamed up with Singapore’s GIC for what they described as the largest-ever take-private of an ASX-listed REIT, the A$6.7 billion acquisition of Australia’s National Storage. The deal gave Brookfield and GIC control of the largest owner-operator of self-storage facilities in Australia and New Zealand, with more than 300 self-storage centres serving over 100,000 residential and commercial customers, according to the companies.