£870M Flurry Of Shopping Centre Deals Shakes Up Slow Sales Year
The UK investment market has been slow in 2025, but the shopping centre sector is finishing with a slew of deals that could total almost £900M.
A range of domestic and international investors have bought or are in talks to buy significant malls across the country, drawn to the sector by high yields and a rapidly improving occupier market, which has led to rising rents.
Last week, U.S. investor Realty Income completed a deal to buy the 1M SF Lexicon Centre in Berkshire, south east England, for £150M from L&G and Schroders.
The deal was Realty Income’s first in the shopping centre sector, having previously been a major buyer of retail warehouses and supermarkets.
That purchase came hot on the heels of the £220M purchase of the 1.1M SF Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow by retailer Frasers Group. The company, founded by Mike Ashley, has been one of the biggest buyers of shopping centres in the UK over the past two years.
The nearby 1M SF Silverburn shopping centre also could be about to trade, with Landsec in talks to buy the scheme from a joint venture between Henderson Park and Eurofund for about £200M, CoStar reported. The duo bought the scheme for about £140M in March 2022.
Landsec, the UK’s second-largest REIT, has made shopping centres its major strategic priority and put a BTR development push on the back burner while it concentrates on the sector.
Eurofund, the investment firm run by Ian Sandford, is also a buyer in the UK mall sector. It is in talks to purchase the 573K SF Broadway shopping centre in Bradford, Yorkshire, out of receivership for £75M, Estates Gazette reported. The magazine also reported that USS is the frontrunner to buy the 137K SF Lion Yard shopping centre in the middle of Cambridge from Aberdeen Investments.
Shopping centre REIT Hammerson also bid on the scheme, and the company rounds out the recent spate of deals — it paid the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority £150M for the 50% of the Oracle shopping centre in Reading, Berkshire, that it did not already own. Hammerson has undertaken similar deals to buy out JV partners at the Bullring in Birmingham and Brent Cross in north London.
