Asian Investor Buys £125M London Data Centre Days After Sister Company Acquires Hotel
A Singaporean REIT has bought a £125M data centre to the north of London about two weeks after its sister company purchased a £215M London hotel.
CapitaLand Ascendas said it had bought the 91K SF data centre in Watford from an international data centre operator, identified elsewhere as Digital Realty Trust. It paid £119M for the asset, a discount to its book value of £125M.
The deal comes within a fortnight of sister company, CapitaLand Ascott Trust, buying the £215M Cavendish London hotel in the West End. Both REITs are managed by CapitaLand Investment, the Singaporean real estate investor and fund manager that has £77B of assets under management.
The two deals mean the company’s subsidiaries have invested £340M in the UK in the space of two weeks.
CapitaLand Ascendas said the deal takes its UK data centre portfolio to £329M across five assets. Its global data centre business is valued at £860M, it said.
It also owns 38 UK logistics assets. The company focuses on business space and logistics.
The data centre purchased is 80% occupied by five tenants on colocation leases and a weighted average lease length of 3.3 years.
“As the demand for cloud and digital services continues to rise, we are capitalising on favourable market dynamics to significantly scale up our presence in the data centre sector,” CapitaLand Ascendas CEO and Executive Director William Tay said in a press release. “London ranks among the top three global data centre markets and is also Europe’s largest colocation data centre market.”
CBRE projects that the vacancy rate by megawatt in London will decline to 15.9% in 2023, down from 16.8% in 2022, the company said in a release on the deal.
