This Week's London Deal Sheet
The Deal Sheet is 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 mike.phillips@bisnow.com.
Amro Partners has acquired a 200K SF office building, Quadrant House, in Sutton, for its next build-to-rent project, taking its total transaction volume since the company’s inception in 2012 to over £1B.
The £170M project will deliver around 450 new build-to-rent homes with shared amenities, including coworking spaces, a gym and wellness centre, a residents’ lounge, a cinema room and roof terraces. It is located directly opposite Sutton train station.
In retaining and extending the existing 1970s office building, Amro will deliver a sustainable residential asset with significant embodied carbon savings. The building will target ratings of BREEAM Outstanding, Fitwel 3* and WiredScore Platinum, in line with Amro’s pledge to become a net-zero carbon company by the end of 2025.
The proposal calls for a retention of the existing concrete structural frame, composed of two interconnected towers, and a vertical extension to create a mixed-use scheme with commercial space on the ground floor.
PEOPLE
Seaforth Land has appointed Jon Allgood as its new head of asset management. Allgood joins from The Crown Estate, where he worked for more than 20 years. Leading a team of five, he was responsible for overseeing office space within the organisation’s 10M SF central London portfolio.
At Seaforth, Allgood will manage the company’s growing London portfolio, including leasing its redevelopment of the Grade II listed, 17-storey Space House in Covent Garden. He will also be working closely with the senior leadership team on new acquisitions to support the wider growth and development of Seaforth.
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Pan-European real estate investment manager Boreal IM has appointed Nikos Koulouras, the former head of investments at global investment adviser AEW, as a partner.
Koulouras brings more than 20 years of investment experience to Boreal IM. The company, founded in late 2021, is assembling a €3B pan-European portfolio in a joint venture with Cadillac Fairview, the real estate arm of the €242B Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund.
Koulouras spent more than seven years as investment head at the €85B AEW, where he led the firm’s pan-European value-add investment team. Prior to AEW, he worked for Merrill Lynch in London and was also joint head of real estate at Salamanca Group. Koulouras has been directly involved in more than €2B of transactions across 12 countries.
Koulouras will focus on the development and implementation of Boreal IM’s overall investment strategy. He joins a senior leadership team led by Boreal IM founder and CEO Louis-Simon Ferland, who oversaw the creation of Blackstone’s €12.5B pan-European logistics platform Logicor. The other two partners are James Farmer, a former Europa Capital partner and regional head of Germany, the Netherlands and Central and Eastern Europe, where he led on all logistics transactions, and Peter Bingel, formerly of Blackstone and now Boreal IM’s chief financial officer.
SALES
Supermarket Income REIT, the real estate investment trust providing inflation-protected long income from grocery property in the UK, has bought a Tesco supermarket in Llanelli, South Wales, for £67M, excluding acquisition costs, reflecting a net initial yield of 5.3%.
The store was developed for Tesco in 1989 and occupies a 10-acre site comprising a 82K SF net sales area supermarket, a 16-pump petrol filling station and 753 car parking spaces. The store is an online hub for Tesco, with 10 home delivery vans and a dedicated click and collect facility in the car park.
The store is being acquired from M&G, with an unexpired lease term of 12 years and annual upward-only RPI-linked rent reviews (subject to a 5% cap and 0% floor).
CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Student accommodation investor and developer Unite Students has reached practical completion on its latest development, Hayloft Point.
Located in the heart of central London, the scheme is Unite’s new flagship purpose-built student accommodation development. It spans 24 storeys and will provide beds for 920 students. It covers 312K SF in total and cost £190M to build.
Facilities include outdoor and indoor social spaces, modern study facilities and a free gym, as well as a cinema, games and karaoke rooms.
Sustainability has been prioritised through the design and development phases, with solar panels on the roof, air source heat pumps throughout and bike storage facilities on each floor.
Hayloft Point has a five-year contract agreed with King’s College London to provide beds for it students. The property is fully let for the 2022/23 academic year.
FINANCING
Specialist bridging lender Glenhawk has agreed a £200M senior funding line with NatWest Markets to support its ambitions to lend £1B annually by 2024. The new facility sits alongside Glenhawk’s existing funding line with J.P. Morgan.
Having doubled the live loan book size over the past 12 months, the funding line will provide Glenhawk with the flexibility to significantly increase its lending volumes. It will support the expansion of its unregulated product range, which will have an increased focus on refurbishment and light development projects, larger loan sizes and commercial real estate, as well as an enhanced regulated offering.
The UK bridging sector has enjoyed a strong second quarter, Glenhawk said: Bridging loan transactions were 10.4% higher than in Q2 2021, according to data from ASTL, and up 17.4% on the previous quarter, while loan books reached a record £6.1B, up 22% on Q2 2021.
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Henderson Park has raised €1.4B for its second European opportunity fund. The firm, run by Nick Weber, is targeting €2.5B Henderson Park Real Estate Fund II. The Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana has stumped up €75M for the fund, which is looking for opportunistic returns, buying in all property sectors across Europe.
