Sale documents are out for the baby brother of land titles deals, South Australia's land services unit.
Street Talk can reveal SA Treasury and sale adviser Investec sent information memorandums to potential buyers earlier this week and are seeking indicative bids on February 28.
While bidders are still sinking their teeth into the documents, it is clear it will be a smaller deal than New South Wales' Land and Property Information (LPI) unit which also happens to be up for sale.
South Australia is offering up control of three statutory bodies that maintain the state's land title registry, provide valuation services and maintain the survey network which determines land boundaries and the like.
It wants a private party to come in and run the unit for 40-years - which is five years longer than the NSW contract - however the number and value of transactions going through the southern state's unit is considerably less.
Each of the buyers in the NSW process - consortiums backed by Hastings Funds Management, Macquarie's MIRA, Borealis Infrastructure's Teranet and The Carlyle Group - are understood to be taking a close look at South Australia, seeking to understand the advantages in running both states' registries.
However, South Australia is also understood to have attracted a number of smaller infrastructure and registry players who are in the dataroom, no doubt tempted to take a look at the well flagged "infrastructure-like cash flow characteristics".
The contract is expected to be worth about $500 million.
The indicative bid phase will be followed by a second and formal bidding round which is expected to wrap up before June 30. That puts it about two months behind a similar process being run by JPMorgan in NSW.
