Stephen Hope

NISSAN Australia has sold its expansive Dandenong headquarters and has started searching for a new corporate home after splitting off its parts warehouse.

It announced to GoAutoNews Premium today that it has recently sold the 11.4 hectare two-title Dandenong property – that it has held for about 40 years – to a private Victorian property group. No price for the land was disclosed but it is valued at about $35 million.

Nissan Australia chief financial officer Stephen Hope told GoAutoNews Premium that the search was now on for a new home for Nissan and Infiniti and that he expected that to be finalised within three years.

“It is early days,” he said. “I have been through this process before and it has to be done with a great amount of discussion.”

The sale of the headquarters mirrors that of Mazda last year which outgrew its long-standing head office in Ferntree Gully Road, Notting Hill, and commissioned a developer to design a grand glass-fronted purpose-built office, training, service and showroom complex which it now leases in nearby Wellington Road, Mulgrave in Melbourne’s east.

Car-makers are finding that offices from past decades are not suitable for the community, collaborative and work-life-balance needs of modern workers with hot-desking, meeting spaces and eating spaces and are increasingly turning to developers to create buildings to meet these new requirements.

GoAutoNews Premium has been told that any future design for Nissan HQ would, for example, need to address the fact that it intends to run fleets of electric and autonomous cars which the employees will use extensively.

Nissan Australia’s exisiting Dandenong property has a two-storey office and three separate warehouse facilities – covering 27,584 square metres – on two titles.

Mr Hope said the primary reason for the sale was the conflict of insufficient office space for a growing staff level and the move of the parts warehouse facility to CEVA Logistics’ huge facility in Truganina in Melbourne’s expanding western industrial suburbs.

He said that there were no plans “at this time” for Renault and Mitsubishi head office to share space with Nissan in the new building.

The Truganina facility, which will become the distribution centre for Nissan, Infiniti, Renault and Mitsubishi parts, will be at “practical completion” in January, he said.

Mr Hope said the move to new premises would “also give us the ability to attract and retain best talent”.

“So having a great office with excellent facilities and superb accessibility is now an option for us,” he said.

“This is our blueprint for the future. It’s about out long-term future in Australia.”

Nissan Australia has been working on the planned move “for quite a while”, Mr Hope said, “and the plan includes a three-year settlement period”.

“So we have plenty of time to make the right decision and go through a full and robust process and coordinating the activity with our Japan parent.”

Mr Hope said it was too early to decide if Nissan funds and owns the new building or, like Mazda, finds a developer and leases it back.

“It is important for us that we don’t just find a building,” he said.

“We must have a building that suits us. We are working with (property consultants) CBRE today to help us find what that facility will look like. We are open to all options, such as buying or leasing.”

Mr Hope said Nissan had held employee engagement workshops to gauge what the staff wanted.

“We now have a very good brief prepared and we are now working with companies to see what our solutions would look like,” he said.

“We are very committed with our employees to continue with those workshops and continue to define what we need.

Nissan Headquarters

“Compared to when we built this facility 40 years ago, our business has – and is – changing and our needs are changing.

“There are changes in technology and working practices that have resulted in new (building design) requirements.

“Some are related to how we train people and how we interact with other organisations and our regional office in Thailand and global office in Japan.

“Innovation is the core of our brand and therefore our new head office needs to reflect innovative approaches to business.”

Mr Hope said the new facility would have three components – office space supporting the Nissan vehicle sales, Nissan financial services, and technical training and development.

“Some of that will be a similar team as today for support engineering in Australia, such as customer quality, and a portion will be EV related,” he said.

On his wishlist is a site that would also contain a showroom. But there is no hint of where the head office would be, whether inner city or remaining in the suburbs.

“Where we will go to, at this point, is a really important decision and we’ll work through that with our Japanese real estate colleagues,” he said.

“What I will say is that our global real estate team has visited and has participated in the sale process and has already been very active in where we go next.”

Mr Hope also confirmed that the casting plant, which employs 200 people, would not be moved.

“We are working to secure additional business for the plant which we will announce shortly,” he said.

By Neil Dowling