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Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, has completed the purchase of the Fruit & Wool Exchange in the City of London for about £300M in one of the first major London deals of the year, CoStar News reported.
The London Fruit & Wool Exchange, jointly redeveloped by Exemplar and funded by M&G Real Estate, is a 309K SF mixed-use scheme comprising offices, retail, and food and beverage space in Spitalfields, which M&G bought from Exemplar for £55M in 2015.
Designed by Bennetts Associates, the seven-storey building has retained its original 1928 brick and Portland stone facade, while the developers spent around £200M creating roof terraces, shops, restaurants and offices in a scheme that got the green light in 2012 after then-London Mayor Boris Johnson intervened to approve the plans after they were initially turned down by Tower Hamlets Council.
The largest office tenant is legal practice Ashurst, which relocated its headquarters to the building in 2019.
Norges Bank Investment Management oversees investments for Norway’s £1.3T sovereign wealth fund and manages revenues derived from the country’s enormous oil and gas resources with a long-term horizon.
The fund has holdings that include a 25% stake in Regent Street, majority owned by The Crown Estate, and it has increased its exposure to London, particularly over the past 12 months. In March, it bought a 25% stake in Shaftesbury Capital’s £2.7B Covent Garden estate, adding to its existing 23.5% holding in the listed group.
And at the start of last year, it entered a joint venture with Grosvenor to acquire a 25% stake in a large mixed-use portfolio around Grosvenor Street and Mount Street in Mayfair, while in May it increased its holding in the Pollen Estate.
The sale also marks a change of direction for M&G, which in 2021 appointed JLL to seek an investment partner to inject up to £1B into a £2.5B UK office portfolio, including the historic building, for its Prudential With-Profits Fund, but it has instead opted to sell the asset.
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