Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF) has sold a £155.3m (€184m) London office building to Legal and General.
Schroders Capital’s real estate team, acting on behalf of the £27bn UK local authority pension scheme, said it has completed the sale of the fully-let 3-8 Whitehall Place office building.
The 95,000sqft asset in London’s West End is let to the UK government’s department for business, energy and industrial strategy until June 2029.
LaSalle Investment Management, which used to manage GMPF’s UK real estate portfolio, paid £80.6m in September 2015 to buy 3-8 Whitehall Place from Aberdeen Property Trust.
GMPF hired Schroders Capital in November last year to take over the management of its £700m UK property portfolio from LaSalle.
Philip Scott, a fund manager at Schroders Capital, said: “With this sale, we have successfully completed the business plan for our new client, GMPF.
“The sale capitalises on the strong current demand for government-backed income in key locations. We will now look to opportunistically reinvest the proceeds into higher-yielding assets offering the potential to deliver attractive returns from our active asset management.”
Neil Dovey, the head of annuity transactions at Legal and General said: “We are delighted to add such a strategic government building to our portfolio, which further cements our wider relationship with the government and our existing portfolio of other government buildings in London as well as within all major regional cities – the majority of which we have funded as new developments.”
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