U.S. Giant Longfellow Makes First UK Life Sciences Investment
Longfellow Real Estate Partners has teamed up with Canadian pension fund PSP to buy a life sciences campus in Cambridge for £170M.
Longfellow and PSP have bought Capital Park Cambridge from a joint venture between Elliott Management and Oval Real Estate. The 42-acre campus includes approximately 250K SF of innovation-focused workspace that is home to a dozen companies from sectors like tech, agtech and biotech to patent law and the NHS/Department of Health, Longfellow said.
Longfellow hired Brockton Capital Director Alex Wright last year to make a big push into the fast-growing UK life sciences real estate sector. It owns or manages 15M SF of life sciences real estate in the U.S. with a value of about $10B.
It plans to buy more assets in Cambridge, Oxford and London.
PSP and Longfellow have invested together in the U.S., and PSP knows the Cambridge, UK, market well, having invested in a campus of office assets near the city’s train station alongside UK pension fund Aviva.
Capital Park was part of a £950M portfolio bought by Elliott and Oval from fund manager Nuveen earlier this year. In the fund’s last published fact sheet, the value of Capital Park was put at £150M, meaning the duo have made a quick profit by spinning out the asset.
