Battersea Power Station Owners Secure £1.1B Refinancing
Owners of the redeveloped Battersea Power Station have secured one of the largest refinancings of the last two years.
CBRE Investment Management advised the Malaysian consortium that owns the giant south west London scheme on a new £1.1B debt facility secured against the commercial elements of the project, Real Estate Capital Europe reported.
The loan refinances an existing £1.1B debt facility that was put in place in 2019 and matured in mid-March this year. The original lenders provided the new loan: Standard Chartered, Malaysian banks CIMB and Maybank, and Singaporean banks OCBC and DBS.
CBRE IM has been working on the refinancing since January last year to get ahead of the deadline during a period in which the rise in interest rates has made refinancing debt more tricky, Real Estate Capital reported.
The debt is secured against the commercial element of the redevelopment, which is centred on the refurbishment of the 1930s brick power station that became derelict after it was decommissioned in the late 1970s.
That commercial part includes 540K of offices, 500K SF of which is leased to Apple; a 700K SF shopping centre in the power station’s former turbine halls; and shops, cafes and restaurants dotted around the site.
The ownership consortium paid £1.6B for this part of the scheme in 2018, part of a forward-funding deal, and CBRE secured the £1.1B development loan that has just been refinanced. The shopping centre opened in 2022, and Apple’s office opened in 2023.
The Malaysian developers behind the scheme are SP Setia and Sime Darby, backed by Malaysian pension funds PNB and EPF.
The wider 42-acre site will feature more than 4,000 new apartments as well as more offices, including the recently launched 200K SF 50 Electric Boulevard, with a total development cost of about £9B.
