Mitsui And Greycoat Secure One Of The Largest London Lettings This Year
The owners of a former Goldman Sachs office building have snagged one of the largest central London office leasing deals this year.
ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, has leased 127K SF at Sancroft in the City, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, CoStar reported. The deal takes the 303K SF building, owned by Mitsui Fudosan and Greycoat, to full occupancy.
The space is being taken by ICE Futures Europe, a division of the company that provides futures trading services in commodities markets like cocoa and coffee.
The largest leasing deal in London in the first half of the year was also at Sancroft, with law firm Goodwin Procter taking 90K SF at the building for a rent of £82.50 a SF, per data from BNP Paribas Real Estate. Convene is the other occupier in the building, with 45K SF.
Sancroft was one of three buildings vacated by Goldman when it moved into a new HQ in Midtown in 2019. Mitsui and Greycoat bought the building for £315M in May this year from Chinese developer Shimao. Shimao bought it from Deka in 2015 for £270M and spent £54M upgrading it when Goldman moved out.
Central London leasing takeup was 4.4M SF in the first half of the year, BNP said, 28% down on the same period in the previous year and 16% below the five-year H1 average.
CoStar said the vacancy rate in the City district had risen from 11% in June to 11.6% today, with large chunks of space coming to the market. CoStar singled out the refurbishment of Alban Gate as one particularly significant example of that.
