recap

It's probably worth recapping on a few things here.

Firstly, at half-year, the Centro Group has 803 properties in total - 129 in Aus, 674 in the US. The Aus properties were valued at A$9.5bn and the US at US$13.6bn. The values have doubtless changed in the last half but the number would have remained about the same.

The Aus assets are a lot, lot larger in size than the US assets as you can tell from the values. Aus assets tend to be big centres, whereas the US assets are strip or community malls.

CAF consisted of 32 properties in the US and the announcement re CAF being sold meant that 29 of these assets were sold for around A$815m. CAF had $475m of debt. We are unsure what will happen to the remaining 3 properties at this stage.

CAWF consist of 28 high quality Aus assets valued at $2.6bn. CAWF has $760.8m of debt. We know 4 of these have been 'peeled out' of the fund (Bankstown 100%, Halls Head 50%, Galleria 50% and Collonades 50%) and sold separately for about $1.2bn.

So at this stage CAWF is being sold in 2 parts:

a) The 4 'peeled' properties for $1.2bn
b) The remaining 24 properties for (presumably) around $1.4bn.

We also now know from the report today that 16 properties in the US are for sale for around $100m.

So, of the 803 properties in the group, roughly 45 of the 674 US assets are up for sale (29 from CAF, 16 in the press today) and 28 of the 129 Aus properties (all from CAWF) are up for sale.

This leaves 758 in the US and 101 in Australia. CC kinda got her numbers wrong.

Looking back to earlier in the year when Centro was negotiating debt extensions, they managed to obtain an extension on part of the debt to longer than anyone expected at the time - this December. Centro told us that lenders need demonstration that asset sales are underway and the company is making progress. If they could demonstrate this, lenders would consider further extensions.

As an aside, you can imagine the company and lenders are meeting on a very, very regular basis. I seem to remember that a trans-pacific working group was set up by Glenn which meets regularly as well. We also know that Ross Johnston has been appointed as Head of Strategy Implementation to focus solely on getting the plan executed.

We know that Centro has about A$3.5bn of assets on the market, about A$815 of which look like they have sold. The deadline for a further A$1.2bn of this (part a above) is lunchtime today (based on the docs we have seen). We know that the $1.4bn of properties is being marketed (part b above) and has been for a number of months. The close of the 16 properties is unclear.

The question then is whether Centro is doing enough to satisfy lenders that progress is being made, given the backdrop of capital markets and the general environment. I don't think Centro needs to pay off all the debt by the deadlines, it just needs to demonstrate that the business is back in control and progress is being made.

I left commercial banking a long while ago, but in my opinion they have made excellent progress in the last 9 months since the problems started, despite everything capitalism has thrown at them.

I suspect the bankers probably agree.