Brookfield Property Partners has bought a London office redevelopment for £211m (€269m) from BlackRock, CarVal Investors and Quadrant Estates.
Moorgate Exchange, in the City of London, was redeveloped and completed in the second quarter of this year. The asset includes 217,465sqft of office space.
Blackrock invested in the asset in 2011 on behalf of its Europe Property Fund III.
Chris McCormack, director at BlackRock, said the site had been bought at a ”challenging time post-crisis, when redevelopment projects were scarce”.
He added: ”We sought to capture the value that the lack of development activity and future demand in the Square Mile would present.”
Robert Balick of CarVal Investors, the fund manager for the project, said Moorgate Exchange was acquired “at a time when there was a capital vacuum for office development in the City of London, and when Crossrail was not yet a factor in pricing”.
He added: “We are now exiting this ideally located asset at a time of stronger capital markets and fast growing rents. We expect the value of Moorgate Exchange to significantly increase in the coming years.”
Earlier this year, BlackRock’s Fund III sold a central Paris property to the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global for €425.6m.
The Madeleine building was sold by BlackRock’s Europe Property Fund III five years after its €210m purchase.
In the UK, Blackrock recently agreed a joint venture to invest in the UK’s industrial sector for its UK property fund.
The firm partnered with private firm Canmoor to launch the BlackRock Industrial Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of the BlackRock UK Property Fund.
The venture, which is targeting high-yielding industrial estates valued at £5m-15m, aims to have a portfolio of at least £150m.
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