This Week's London Deal Sheet
A weekly compilation of Greater London and beyond's biggest leases, sales, financing deals, construction updates and personnel moves. Have news you’d like to submit? Email tim.clark@bisnow.com.
Nuveen has exchanged on the sale of all of the assets in the Janus Henderson UK Property PAIF for £1B and is now giving cash back to the fund’s investors.
Hedge fund Elliott Management, in a joint venture with investment manager Oval Real Estate, is buying the assets. CBRE advised Nuveen, which manages the fund, on the sale.
Nuveen decided to sell the portfolio to meet the redemption requests made by the thousands of individual investors that put money into the fund.
A fact sheet for the fund said 35% of its assets are in the industrial sector, 18% in offices and 17% in cash, with the rest a mix of other asset classes.
Its largest asset is the Capital Business Park in Cambridge, which could be repositioned as a life sciences asset. The portfolio also includes a former John Lewis department store in Croydon.
SALES
Valor Real Estate Partners has bought two urban logistics estates located in Wandsworth and Tottenham for a combined £30M. Valor has now deployed more than £750M in London since the beginning of 2021, across 22 transactions.
In Tottenham, Valor has completed the acquisition of a 65K SF industrial estate on West Road from a private seller. The estate is currently fully let to a vehicle recycling company and sits on a 2.5-acre site.
In Wandsworth, Valor has acquired a 22K SF warehouse unit from a private seller, currently let to womenswear retailer Phase Eight. The asset is adjacent to a 1.1-acre site acquired by Valor in December 2021.
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CA Ventures has completed the sale of its initial 897-bed portfolio of purpose-built student accommodation assets in the UK for a combined transaction value of approximately £161M to funds managed by Apollo Global Management. The deal comes after the three communities across Sheffield, Glasgow and Edinburgh reached 100% leased in their first year. All leasing and marketing efforts were managed by CA’s in-house PBSA operating platform, Novel Student.
LEASES
ITV has taken 125K SF of office space across three upper floors and some of the ground floor at the Broadcast Centre, part of Cadillac Fairview and Stanhope’s White City Place scheme in West London. The space was previously occupied by the BBC. A further 1,200 ITV staff will move in next year so that by mid-2023 the whole ITV London team of more than 2,000 staff will all be in one location for the first time.
CORPORATE DEALS
Thor Equities has set up a new European data centre platform. Thor Digital will have an equity commitment of up to $3B (£2.4B), which combined with debt will give it up to $9B (£7.2B) of firepower in the sector. Thor said it had signed a contract to acquire and develop a €600M data centre facility in Madrid known as Madrid One. It has appointed industry expert Roy Gibbens to lead Thor Digital and oversee expansion into new and emerging markets, with primary responsibility across EMEA.
FINANCE
Blackstone has completed the €21B (£17.7B) recapitalisation of Mileway, the firm's urban logistics platform. The business was sold from existing Blackstone funds into a new vehicle with no termination date. That vehicle is owned by a mix of existing investors in Blackstone’s funds and new investors, with a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund owning a significant minority share.
Mileway’s portfolio comprises about 1,700 assets totalling 158M SF across 10 countries and almost 100 cities. The recapitalisation is the largest ever not involving a listed company.
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Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation has picked Canadian pension fund Oxford Properties and Reef as its preferred development partners for the delivery of the Snowsfields Quarter site near London Bridge.
The £350M investment will create a 300K SF life sciences hub with lab facilities across three new buildings in a health innovation cluster. The envisioned project, adjacent to the Guy’s campus, will play a central role in creating the highly technical, real estate infrastructure supporting the emergence of the SC1 innovation cluster.
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U+I and Transport for London, public-private joint venture partners on the Liberty of Southwark, said Landsec will be their funding partner for the consented, mixed-use development, following a competitive bidding process.
The Liberty will provide more than 160K SF of new office space, plus shops, restaurants, cafés, flexible small-business workspace and new homes.
Landsec, which acquired U+I in December 2021, has paid £55M for the land, giving it 100% ownership of The Liberty. The scheme is intended to move into Landsec’s central London office portfolio and augment its existing Southwark pipeline, including The Forge, Red Lion Court and Timber Square.
PERSONNEL
Europa Capital, the pan-European real estate investment manager, has appointed Radina Koleva as senior associate, Portfolio & Asset Management, further growing its pan-European asset management capabilities.
With nearly 10 years of experience in the real estate sector, Koleva will primarily be responsible for supporting the asset management of Europa Capital’s open-ended core fund, the Europa Diversified Income Fund, with assets throughout Europe.
Koleva will be based in Europa Capital’s Paris office. She previously worked at QNB Capital (Qatar National Bank) where she was responsible for co-managing a €600M portfolio of core and value-add commercial real estate in France focused on offices, luxury hospitality and industrial.
