This Week's London Deal Sheet
The Deal Sheet is a weekly compilation of Greater London and beyond's biggest leases, sales, financing deals, construction updates and personnel moves. Have news you’d like to submit? Email mark.faithfull@bisnow.com.
Patrizia has submitted plans to deliver a sustainable, wellness-led office development in the City of London at 30 Minories.
The current building comprises a 16-storey tower and seven-storey podium, which is currently considered obsolete, and under its proposals, Patrizia will replace the asset with a 16-storey building, providing over 185K SF net internal area of office space on the upper levels and a range of flexible retail, leisure and employment uses on the ground and below-ground levels.
Accessible terraces on each floor will incorporate ‘English woodland’ landscaping inspired by landscape architect Kim Wilkie.
The retained and substantially refurbished Writers House, a Victorian warehouse heavily altered in the 19th century, will provide community floorspace at ground and lower ground level, with the upper levels of the six-storey building leased at affordable rents to local enterprises.
ACQUISITIONS
Pontegadea, Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega's real estate vehicle, has completed its acquisition of 33 Foley Street in London's Fitzrovia from Abrdn.
In March the real estate investor went under offer to buy the former BBC office for around £80M. The sale has now completed for around £81M, or a 4.43% yield.
The Standard Life Investments Long Lease Fund purchased the building from Kier Property in a sale-leaseback transaction in 2017 for £70M.
Kier had completed a full redevelopment and extension of the building to create a total of 42K SF of grade-A offices. As part of the purchase, Standard Life Investments secured a 25-year lease with inflation-linked rent reviews to Kier Group, which relocated its Kier Property office from Cavendish Place in January 2018.
The building was originally built as a printing works in the 1920s, and Savills advised Abrdn on the transaction.
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Industrials REIT has agreed to terms of the proposed acquisition by Blackstone that values the UK multi-let industrial property group at around €577M.
Under the terms of the acquisition, Sussex Bidco will buy the London-based real estate investment trust for 168p per share. The Jersey-based Sussex Bidco was formed on 24 March for the purposes of the acquisition and is an entity owned indirectly by investment funds advised by Blackstone.
Industrials REIT Chair Richard Grant said the group believed the offer was in the best interests of its shareholders, providing them with cash certainty at an attractive premium to the pre-offer share price.
"As one of the largest investors in logistics real estate globally and in the UK, we have been preparing for this cycle for a long time and have assembled a high-quality portfolio and positioned it for growth," Blackstone Real Estate Europe Head James Seppala said. "We have the track record, capital and scale to enable Industrials to capitalise on the opportunities ahead."
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Telford Homes, Notting Hill Genesis and London BTR Investments Ltd, a joint venture between EQT Exeter and Sigma Capital Group, have exchanged on a £66M forward sale of the build-to-rent element of the Gallions Quarter Phase 2B site at Royal Albert Wharf in the Royal Docks.
Units will be ready for occupancy in Q1 2024 and the project will feature two buildings offering a total of 132 homes for market rent, which will be managed under Sigma’s Simple Life London brand.
An additional 135 homes, 51% of the overall scheme, are being delivered as a combination of affordable rent and shared ownership and will be owned and managed by Notting Hill Genesis.
The deal will be Telford Homes’ 12th BTR transaction, and it has now delivered over 1,000 BTR homes across London, with a further 4,650 in the pipeline.
OCCUPIERS
U.S. investor Apollo has opened a new European headquarters in central London, launching its new European hub at 1 Soho Place, with 88K SF that can accommodate more than 400 employees.
It is bringing together teams from two existing London offices totalling 56K SF, and the four floors the company has include client space, a coffee bar, an employee dining area and a fitness centre. The building is located over the Tottenham Court Road Elizabeth line and underground station.
“We have more capital to deploy than ever with European-based teams managing nearly a quarter of Apollo’s $548B,” Apollo partner and Head of Europe Rob Seminara said. “We were clearly running out of space before.”
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Native Land has completed Arbor, a 223K SF sustainable office workspace. The completion was announced alongside a new letting to the FTSE 100-listed industrial technology business Smiths Group.
Smiths Group will relocate its global headquarters to Arbor at Bankside Yards from St James’s Square in W1, taking a 13.6K SF office floor with a private terrace.
Arbor is an all-electric office building that is net-zero carbon in operation, and global climate consultancy The Carbon Trust will also relocate its global headquarters to the building in April. Law firm Lewis Silkin will move into 28K SF on the sixth and seventh floors after taking a pre-let in December 2021. Native Land said it is in active negotiations on a further 78K SF within the building.
Arbor is the first building to complete at the 1.4M SF Bankside Yards development. Designed by PLP Architecture, Arbor provides 19 storeys of workspace.
FINANCE
Silbury Finance, the Oaktree Capital Management-backed development lender, has provided a £39M senior loan to Stonegate Homes, the residential developer focused on brownfield site regeneration in the Homes Counties.
The 12-month facility, at 90% loan to cost, will fund the acquisition of a 20-acre brownfield site in Dorking, Surrey, where Stonegate Homes has secured planning to develop an initial 226 homes for sale.
It represents the second loan that Silbury has provided Stonegate Homes, and the site is known as Pixham End and, alongside converting a former office building owned by Aviva Investors into 226 homes under permitted development rights, planning applications have been submitted for an additional 41 townhouses, a large retirement living development and 8K SF of commercial space.
Since launching in January 2021, Silbury has originated 16 loans totalling £618M of new finance across the retirement living and build-to-sell sectors to 12 different borrowers, with a gross asset value of circa £918M.
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Essen-based owner-managed investment manager Aukera Real Estate has secured a new mandate for the real estate debt fund it advises.
A German insurance company has provided capital commitments of €150M, and the funds are to be invested in senior secured pan-European real estate loans with a conservative loan-to-value ratio of below 50% as part of a new investment strategy.
The fund targets institutional investors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Under the "super-senior" strategy, the fund will invest in short-term, predominantly floating-rate, senior secured real estate loans in continental Europe as well as in the UK.
The term of the mandate is seven years.
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Landsec has unveiled the details behind its £20M social impact fund, Landsec Futures. The programme is committed to creating a fairer, more equitable real estate industry in the UK by enhancing social mobility and delivering £200M worth of social value by 2030, the company said.
Landsec Futures has been designed to address the need for greater representation in the real estate industry by investing in four new social impact programmes centred on industry action and local communities.
“Despite greater focus on diversity in recent years, we know the real estate industry is not where it needs to be if we want to create more inclusive, sustainable, and successful places that support people and businesses to thrive," Landsec Head of ESG and Sustainability Jennie Colville said. "We need our industry to include a more diverse representation of people from all walks of life, empowering them to lead change in the places they know the best.”
PEOPLE
Oxford Properties Group has appointed Tina Pristovsek as vice president, real estate finance and capital markets - Europe. Based in London, Pristovsek will help develop and implement financing strategies for Oxford’s European business.
Pristovsek will also be responsible for monitoring and managing the company’s €3B existing European debt portfolio, including coordinating its loan compliance efforts in the region. In addition, she will continue to build and strengthen relationships with Oxford’s European and global lending partners.
Pristovsek joins Oxford from Bank of America, where she was most recently a director in the EMEA Real Estate Structured Finance team in London.
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NW1 Partners has appointed Brooks Blake as partner and head of Europe, overseeing strategies focused on Spanish logistics and industrial outdoor storage across the UK and Europe.
Prior to joining NW1, Brooks spent 11 years investing in real assets for three large family offices, leading on circa 90 separate investments. During this period, he was responsible for investment strategy, portfolio construction, deal sourcing, due diligence and risk management.
As part of the company’s strategic growth plans, NW1 has also appointed Giancarlo Vissat as senior vice president.
