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Speaking at Bisnow’s London State of the Market event last October, Brookfield’s then head of European real estate Zach Vaughan said the firm remained bullish on London and UK offices, in spite of the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. And the company is putting its money where its mouth is.
Last week the Canadian firm completed the largest single-asset London deal since before the pandemic when it paid £635M for Plantation Place in the City of London.
And now it is at the point of completing a deal to buy a portfolio of business parks for £720M, CoStar reported.
Brookfield is buying Arlington, a business parks company that owns four assets totalling 1.6M SF in London and the south west, from TPG.
The portfolio being bought comprises Hammersmith Embankment and Uxbridge Business Park in west London, Oxford Business Park and Gloucester Business Park.
TPG bought Arlington in 2017 for £450M from Legal & General and Goodman, at a time when business parks and out-of-town offices were in the doghouse — that year the sector was in the bottom three choices for investment among respondents to the ULI and PwC’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe report.
TPG has leased up vacant space to improve the income of the portfolio, and sentiment toward offices outside of central business districts has improved as a result of the pandemic.
Another factor in Arlington’s favour is that 30% of the rent comes from life sciences tenants, CoStar said, a sector which is gaining increasing interest from a variety of investors.
Brookfield is also buying Milton Gate, another office in the City of London, for more than £200M, which would take its London and UK office spending past £1.5B this year.
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