South East Shopping Centre Once Sold For £116M Goes Into Administration

A shopping centre in Surrey sold by British Land for £116M in 2008 has gone into administration. 

Administrators from Grant Thornton were this week appointed to a group of special-purpose vehicles that own the 500K SF Peacocks Centre in Woking, 30 miles south west of London. The companies that own the centre are subsidiaries of Moyallen Holdings, a Northern Ireland-based company owned by a group of private investors. 

The centre is the latest in the slow drip of once valuable retail assets falling into insolvency proceedings in the past few years, as retail rents fall and values drop. 

Moyallen bought the centre from British Land for £116M in 2008, just as the last real estate cycle reached its peak. 

Accounts for one of the companies now in administration showed the value had fallen to £66M at the end of 2020 and that creditors owed a total of £139M needed to be repaid within a year. A separate document showed that Bank of Ireland provided a loan to the company. 

A statement from Grant Thornton said that the centre would continue to trade as normal.

Moyallen also has a joint venture with Woking Borough Council to redevelop the entirety of Woking’s town centre retail assets under the name Victoria Place. A statement from the council said that project was unaffected. 

“Moyallen Developments Ltd., the company managing the Victoria Place development, is unaffected, as is the Victoria Square Woking Limited joint venture company with the Council,” Woking Borough Council chief executive Julie Fisher said.