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
Sovereign Housing Association has bought the Princes Mead Shopping Centre and two adjacent retail assets in Farnborough for £17.6M from Knight Frank Investment Management on behalf of Local Pensions Partnership Investments.
The acquisition allows the 61,000-home housing association to bring forward a residential-led mixed-use regeneration in Farnborough town centre, delivering more affordable housing across the south of England. The 7.77-acre site offers significant mixed-use, mixed-tenure residential development potential, with a masterplan to deliver more than 350 new homes in the town centre.
The acquisition corresponds with Sovereign’s investment strategy, which seeks opportunities to reposition high street and town centre regeneration.
The deal sees KFIM and LPPI remain involved in the development project as overage partners. Montagu Evans and DWF advised Knight Frank Investment Management. JLL advised Sovereign.
LEASES
Blackstone has reached an agreement to establish a newly constructed, purpose-built European headquarters located in its long-term London home, Berkeley Square.
The firm’s London headcount has doubled over the past three years, now standing at more than 500 people.
This agreement will see Blackstone occupy a 226K SF, 10-floor building on Berkeley Square on the site currently occupied by Lansdowne House. The new Lansdowne House is being led by London commercial property developer CO—RE and Stirling Prize-winning architect AHMM. It is owned by the Brunei Investment Authority.
With construction slated to be completed by 2028, planning permission has been secured for the redevelopment, which is touted as setting new standards in sustainability and will accommodate more than 1,800 seats. The project also includes 14K SF of ground-floor retail space and redeveloped public areas surrounding the site at the south end of the square.
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Apple has signed a 10-year lease to occupy 76K SF in additional office space at the 1.3M SF 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London, CoStar reported.
Apple had already leased 130K SF at the building, which is owned by a consortium led by AXA-IM Alts and was developed by Lipton Rogers.
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Pembroke has announced that biotechnology company Epoch Biodesign has signed a new lease at 10 Finsbury Square in central London.
A pioneer in synthetic biology, Epoch Biodesign will occupy 12K SF in 10 Finsbury Square’s Green Room, a recently reimagined fitted workspace offering an agile working environment, including adaptable studio, lab space and substantial end-of-trip facilities to support its growing workforce. The company’s move into the City of London highlights the area’s growing attraction for life sciences companies that want to ensure they are located near the best UK talent, Pembroke said.
CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Mission Street and BentallGreenOak will deliver a science and innovation campus less than 10 minutes east of the city centre following the acquisition of a 23-acre site on Coldham’s Lane in Cambridge.
This is the fifth and largest acquisition by the specialist science and innovation development joint venture since the partnership formed in January 2021. The platform now has a development pipeline of more than 1M SF of lab and office space in strategic UK locations, with initial schemes in Oxford and Cambridge due for completion in mid-2023.
FINANCING
Aeon Investments has closed its first commercial real estate CLO warehouse in the UK, backed by three strategic loan agreements totalling £900M, as it continues to grow its private credit business.
Loans will be funded through Aeon's balance sheet and a three-year revolving senior warehouse facility provided by Credit Suisse. Aeon expects to issue three CLOs over the next two to three years.
Aeon’s recent agreements with WayPark Capital, a newly launched commercial real estate lending platform; private bank Arbuthnot Latham & Co; and specialist SME finance platform Assetz Capital expand its commercial real estate investment programme, which launched in Q4 2021.
The originators will provide commercial real estate borrowers with tailored loans and financial solutions of between £2M and £20M with LTV ratios of up to 75% for acquisitions, refinancing and asset upgrades across the UK, including offices, industrial units, warehouses and some retail properties.
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BWP REIT plc, a newly formed single-asset company established to acquire Bridgewater Place — an office-led mixed-use property situated in central Leeds and independently valued at £63M — announced its intention to raise £35M through the issue of 35 million new ordinary shares on the IPSX exchange.
Bridgewater Place is a large office, retail and residential mixed-use property completed in April 2007 that sits on a 3-acre freehold site. At 30 above-ground storeys, it was the tallest property in Yorkshire until 2021. The internal demise of the residential accommodation was sold under a 250-year lease in 2007.
The property comprises two separate but interconnecting structures on either side of a central atrium, with 16K SF of retail units on the ground and first floors and 235K SF of commercial office space from floors one to nine. A 20-storey residential tower of 198 apartments sits above the offices on the west wing, spanning floors 11 to 30.
The property generates an annual contracted rental income of £6M, with a weighted average unexpired lease term of 3.74 years to break and 3.93 years to expiry. Approximately 8% of the total floor area is vacant.
THIS AND THAT
Grosvenor’s UK property business has invested in Pupil, a spatial data company that has created an ecosystem to digitally map the built world.
Pupil’s products, Spec and Stak, combine artificial intelligence, industrial-grade light detection and ranging scanning hardware to capture millions of points of measurement to document commercial and residential properties and to produce digital twins of the spaces.
Grosvenor will support Pupil’s future growth and ongoing product development. The business is entering into a strategic partnership with Pupil to create a digital footprint of a significant portion of its portfolio, including floorplans, photography, CAD drawings, lease plans, site information drawings and 3D models.
