A Hong Kong billionaire sealed the sale of the Lotus portfolio, 27 West End buildings put on the market last August.
Opportunistic US investor Elliott Management and London asset manager Oval Real Estate have exchanged contracts with Samuel Tak Lee to buy nearly 30 properties around Great Portland Street.
Bids for the assets, sold by Tak Lee’s Langham Estate, which include offices, medical premises, flats, shops and eateries, were reported as topping £370 mln. However, it is believed that the successful buyers will pay slightly over £300 mln, while in a separate deal, another buyer has picked up a residential building that had been in the portfolio for £50 mln.
The transaction is the largest to exchange in 2023 in the West End: in December 2022 Lazari Investments exchanged on the acquisition of the Fenwick department store in Bond Street for £428 mln. That deal completed in January 2023.
JLL and Savills’ successful sale of the Langham Estate Lotus portfolio is a huge boost for the West End which saw a slow drip of mainly £40 mln-£100 mln deals throughout 2023. Agents predict that 2023 will struggle to top 2009, the previous low point for transactional activity when there were approximately £3 bn of West End sales.
In continental Europe, the largest deal in the last week was Partners Group’s circa €280 mln acquisition of 10 retail parks in Belgium and Portugal from specialist developer Mitiska REIM. All the parks are food-anchored by major supermarkets such as Lidl, Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Mercadona, Auchan or Pingo Doce.
Mitiska said that, together with a recent sale of 25 Romanian retail parks to a different buyer, investors in the fund that owned the Belgian and Romanian assets had received returns ‘at the high end of expectations.’
There was a huge loan closed, as Blackstone’s Mileway refinanced about 75% of its debt with €7.5 bn of fresh finance. The company’s whole portfolio was valued in mid 2022 at €21 bn. Costar reported that the margin on the new loan from a syndicate of international banks is in the mid-200 bps range.
Little new product came to the market except the possibility that UK entrepreneur Richard Caring will sell all or a substantial part of his Ivy chain of restaurants.
We also log the rest of the new deals and loans, and one fund raising in the market.
