The owner of News Corp’s principal print site in Queensland has sold it for $27 million, with reports that News has signed a new contract covering the next 20 years.

Online site realestatesource.com.au reported that WOTSO – a company that rents out co-working spaces across Australia and New Zealand – sold the APN Print site in Pioneer Road, Yandina, taking a loss on the $28.76 million it had paid for it.

According to the report, the site, which was originally developed by APN News & Media before the publisher’s sale to News Corp Australia, returns $2.45 million a year in rent. News Corp for subsidiary APN Print had just recommitted for 20 years, with an agreement for annual three per cent rent rises. As part of the lease, it also picks up outgoings including land tax.

APN has printed News’ publications including The Australian and the Courier-Mail at Yandina since it closed its iconic plant in Brisbane’s Murarrie. The massive Murrarie building in Lytton Road (pictured) – last to open of Rupert Murdoch’s five 1990s ‘colour newspapers’ print sites – closed in 2021.

It had been home to five manroland Newsman presses and a twinned Ferag mailroom. There are reports that current owner Fife Capital wants to turn the 60,000 m2 site building in Lytton Road into a multistorey cold storage facility.

In Yandina, News also prints contract work including SE Queensland editions of Nine Publishing mastheads such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review. It also prints some local publications.

The site is anchored by a hybrid heatset/coldset manroland Regioman newspaper press installed by APN as the centrepiece of a network of print sites, the others using Indian-built Manugraph presses. All of these have since closed, with the exception of the Rockhampton site, which News sold to the publisher of the Today group of newspapers.