One of the properties sold by the church in December last year has returned an 84 per cent gross profit to Metro Property Development. They bought the property in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne for $5m and have sold it for $9.2m, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review.

The AFR reports that Metro bought six properties from the church in December. Hypothetically, if Metro were to make only half the margin of profit on the remaining five properties, they will walk away with an extra $8.4million. That would be a cool $13.2m on the original $25m deal.

“The 29 properties sold late last year represented just over half of the 51 originally identified for divestment in October 2013,” the Uniting Church’s Victoria/Tasmania newspaper Crosslight reported in February.

The church received $56million in net funds. The divestment was forced by the failure of Acacia College, a start-up school in Melbourne’s north. The campus sold to be used as a campus of Gilson College, a Seventh Day Adventist school.

The six properties sold to Metro appear to account for over a third of the revenue raised and can be seen to have contributed to the divestment occurring between October 2013 and January 2014.

It should be noted that most of the properties sold were vacant churches, halls and land, manses (house provided for a minister) and tennis courts. The sales represent about 1 per cent of the synod’s property portfolio, according to Crosslight.