Aerium to offload London office asset on behalf of Korea's Hanwha Life

Aerium is selling a London office asset for Korea’s Hanwha Life.

Aerium is expecting offers of around £190m (€244.5m), with CBRE mandated to find a buyer for the asset, in London’s Wood Street.

The company paid £105.5m for the asset in 2009, before selling it to the Korean insurance group for £143.5m in 2012, remaining as asset manager.

The 184,000sqft building is fully let to law firm Eversheds for a further 10 years at an average rent of £48 per square foot.

Robin Carr, fund director at Aerium, said: “This is an exciting time to be launching such a prime reversionary asset as 1 Wood Street into the market, with rents in central London already approaching record levels and the prognosis for ongoing rental growth exceptionally positive.”

Aerium said it completed nearly €1.2bn of transactions in 2015.

Chairman Ely-Michel Ruimy said the company expected 2016 to be equally busy, divesting assets from funds that had matured.

“We also expect to remain active on the acquisition front as we continue to see a number of exciting opportunities to selectively grow our funds through the addition of a diverse range of assets, from core down to opportunistic, to our portfolio,” Ruimy said. 

“We have been further broadening our investment reach and expect to pay particular focus to the Austrian, Dutch, Portuguese and Italian markets, where we are starting to see some compelling investment opportunities for commercial assets.”