Amazon Takes 180K SF Shoreditch Lease At Cain Scheme Where Refinancing Looms
Amazon has agreed to lease 180K SF of office space at an £800M Shoreditch scheme whose owners are working on a major refinancing.
The tech giant is due to take space at The Stage scheme in Shoreditch that was previously scheduled to be leased by WeWork, React News reported.
The scheme is close to Principal Place on the edge of the City of London, where Amazon leases more than 500K SF. The new deal would take the amount of office space it leases in London beyond 1M SF, React reported. The company appointed Cushman & Wakefield to look for 200K SF in February 2020 but put that search on hold due to the pandemic.
The company also occupies 210K SF at Sixty London in Midtown and 100K SF at Moor Place in the City.
The Stage is a mixed-use scheme on the City of London and Shoreditch border that includes 412 apartments in a 40-storey residential tower, 220K SF of office and 60K SF of retail. It is owned by a joint venture between Jonathan Goldstein and Todd Boehly’s Cain International, Galliard Homes and China Vanke. It was scheduled to be completed by 31 January this year.
The name comes from the scheme's location on the former site of The Curtain Theatre, used by Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain's Men theatre company from 1597 to 1599. The play Henry V debuted there.
The consortium took out a £390M loan from a syndicate of lenders headed by Lloyds to undertake the construction, £308M of which had been drawn, according to accounts for the special-purpose vehicle that owns the development. The records were filed in October last year and are the last that are publicly available.
That loan was scheduled to mature in autumn 2022 but was extended to April 2023. The consortium was in talks with a new lender, per the accounts, and React reported that new debt was being sought. Companies House did not have a record of the original loan being repaid and a new loan being registered.
The accounts said that in 2022, the company expected to breach milestones it needed to hit based on pre-sales of apartment units and had received a waiver from its lenders.
