Singaporean Investor Lines Up Biggest London Deal Since The Summer
Listed Singaporean investor City Developments Ltd said it is in talks to buy the St Katharine Docks marina and office complex on the eastern edge of the City of London in what would be one of the largest new London office deals since interest rates spiked last summer.
CDL said in an announcement to the Singapore Stock Exchange that it had signed an exclusivity agreement and nonbinding heads of terms to buy St Katharine Docks from Blackstone, though a deal is not definite.
React News, which first reported the deal, said that CDL was paying about £400M for the 515K SF scheme, less than the £435M Blackstone was going to sell the building for in 2018. It opted to refinance rather than sell the asset at that time.
St Katharine Docks is central London’s only marina and comprises 445K SF of offices, 70K SF of shops, restaurants and bars, and a 10-acre, 160-berth marina.
Blackstone acquired the asset through its deal to take Nick Leslau’s Max Property private in 2014. It paid £448M for the business, which also included other London office assets and a large industrial portfolio. It has leased up vacant space in the office element of the scheme with tenants including WeWork and the New College of Humanities.
CDL has been one of the foreign investors willing to invest in the UK in the past six months. It bought a portfolio of five student accommodation assets with a total of 1,863 beds in Birmingham, Canterbury, Coventry, Leeds and Southampton for £215M last December.
Even so, market volatility created by interest rate rises caused it to postpone the listing of a new £500M REIT that would have held London assets, including 125 Old Broad Street in the City.
If the St Katharine Docks deal were to go ahead, it would be a big boost for the London office market, where just £365M traded hands in the fourth quarter of 2022, CoStar data showed. Last week Chinachem completed a deal to buy One New Street Square from Landsec for £350M.
