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.
ARC, Brookfield’s UK life sciences real estate business, is adding Refinery, a 121K SF science and tech laboratory building to its west London cluster, addressing what it called the crippling shortage of lab space across London and the wider Golden Triangle.
Construction for Refinery will commence this year and is due for completion in 2024. Refinery will combine flexible wet and dry lab space and research and development facilities with amenities, including restaurants, cafés, and event and presentation studios suitable for science and tech SMEs as well as multinationals.
The announcement comes just weeks after ARC launched Motherlabs in west London, its accelerator and incubator space, which is already over 60% occupied. Together with Refinery, it will allow startups the opportunity to scale at pace and transition to larger laboratories on the same site, the company said. ARC West London was formerly known as Manbré Wharf.
With demand for high-quality, strategically located lab-enabled space outstripping supply, ARC has plans for further growth across the UK and Europe, and is in active discussions on several potential new sites. ARC has 5M SF of development potential across the UK’s Golden Triangle, with 3M SF planned at its 700-acre Harwell site in Oxfordshire and a further 750K SF in Oxford.
PEOPLE
Development lender Précis Capital Partners has appointed Ben Lynch as senior director, credit, and Benoit Fesquet as associate director. Both will report directly to David Jerrard, Précis Capital's chief credit officer.
Lynch joins Précis Capital from Kinetic Capital, where he was director of credit. He previously worked as director, credit, at Urban Exposure and has also held roles at Pluto Finance, OakNorth Bank, Santander, Clydesdale Bank and HSBC.
Fesquet also joins from Kinetic Capital, where he worked as a senior associate. With more than a decade of experience in real estate finance, he previously held positions at Urban Exposure, CBRE and GE Real Estate.
CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Dominvs Group has received approval from the London Legacy Development Corporation's planning committee for a mixed-use scheme on Stratford High Street.
Dominvs acquired two adjoining sites, 304-312 Stratford High Street, off market from The Collective in December 2020, and 302 Stratford High Street from a private vendor. 302 Stratford High Street was a nonoperational pub that had been shut down by the previous owners.
The sites have been combined for delivery of a 465-bed student accommodation-led mixed-use scheme, with wider investment into local infrastructure and community amenities. The project marks the third in a series of student-led offerings tabled by the firm.
Dominvs has received consent for a total of 1,822 student beds in London this year, having previously received consent for a 644-bed scheme in Holborn and a 713-bed scheme in Hammersmith. Following consent at Hammersmith, Dominvs completed the UK’s largest-ever purpose-built student accommodation forward fund with Scape, at £173M.
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A new joint venture between Grosvenor and Mitsui Fudosan UK has been formed to deliver an element of a sustainable mixed-use development in London’s Mayfair.
Focusing on the 263K SF north and south blocks of the South Molton Triangle scheme, the partnership will deliver grade-A office space together with a range of retail and food and beverage outlets at street level. The development cost of the scheme is about £500M.
Grosvenor will deliver the other phases of the project, including community, residential and additional retail elements, as well as a new 5-star boutique hotel.
FINANCING
Investec has provided a 51-month, £65M development loan to Scape, the global student accommodation provider, to support the construction of a 693-unit scheme in Leeds, which is due to complete in time for the 2024/2025 academic year.
The loan means Investec has committed more than £1B of senior finance in the high-growth UK purpose-built student accommodation sector in the past decade. Since 2011, Investec has supported more than 17 clients, including CA Ventures, Scape, Student Roost and Watkin Jones, with the delivery of 22,000 beds across 52 schemes in 23 cities.
THIS AND THAT
Aviva Investors will invest up to £110M in Connected Kerb, the electric vehicle infrastructure specialist.
The investment, part of Aviva's climate transition strategy, will support Connected Kerb’s plans to deliver 190,000 on-street EV chargers by 2030, and corresponds to almost one-third of all funding committed by public policy initiatives to date.
Alongside its equity investment, Aviva has also appointed Connected Kerb to roll out EV charging infrastructure across its portfolio of real estate assets as it continues a programme of decarbonisation and commitment to reaching net zero across its entire real assets business by 2040.
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Pub operator JD Wetherspoon has appointed CBRE and Savills to sell 32 of its pubs.
The properties, which comprise a mix of 10 freehold and 22 leasehold units, are located across England and are being considered for sale either individually, in small packages or as a portfolio.
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Cushman & Wakefield, acting on behalf of MEAG, has been appointed to sell 21 Grosvenor Place, a refurbishment opportunity in the West End, providing an owner with the potential to create an asset that includes offices, healthcare and alternative use sectors.
The property currently comprises 57K SF of office and retail accommodation arranged over lower ground, ground and five upper floors. The block date in December 2023 offers an opportunity to comprehensively refurbish the property, with feasibility studies demonstrating the potential to increase massing by up to 21K SF.
A medical and healthcare use is currently supported within the headlease. The recent development of a private hospital at 33 Grosvenor Place and the ongoing development of the Peninsular Hotel at 1 Grosvenor Place supports this repositioning.
