TriOffice, the office investment arm of UK value-add real estate investor and asset manager Tri7 Group, has struck its first deal with the acquisition of an asset in Manchester in a joint venture with The Pears Group.
The asset at 55 Spring Gardens in Manchester’s central business district is a 55,385 ft2 (5,145 m2) prime freehold office let to multiple tenants including Clarke Willmott, SysGroup, and CAF Rail.
The property was acquired from an unnamed UK institutional vendor and financial details were not disclosed, however PropertyEU understands from market sources that it changed hands at a discount to the guide price of £15.3 mln (€18.4 mln).
The asset, which has undergone two major refurbishments in the past decade by its previous institutional owners, has an average passing rent of £28.86 per ft2, offering significant reversionary potential, TriOffice said.
The acquisition is the first for Tri7 Group’s new office investment business, which was set up in September to target value-add opportunities in the UK and recently appointed Ben Beck as managing partner.
Samuel Castle, founding partner at Tri7 Group, said: ‘We set up TriOffice last month to capitalise on value-add opportunities within the office sector. We believe that the scarcity of high-quality office stock, combined with the occupational resilience that has been witnessed in the major regional office markets, will lead to strong performance for those who upgrade and reposition prime-located office stock at this point in the cycle.
‘For an opportunistic and agile investor like Tri7, we believe now is the right time to deploy capital into the sector and 55 Spring Gardens is a great example of the type of schemes we’re looking at across the UK. We are delighted to be working with The Pears Group on our maiden acquisition into the TriOffice strategy.’
Knight Frank advised the vendor.
TriOffice sits alongside Tri7’s living strategy, which has a pipeline of purpose-built student accommodation assets worth more than £1 bn in gross development value in Russell Group university towns and cities.
