US property investors Westbrook is buying London's Shell-Mex House, an art-deco office building overlooking the Thames river, for about £490 mln (EUR725 mln). The trophy asset in the West End district of London is owned by a consortium including entrepreneurs Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz, David and Simon Reuben, and Jack Dellal. The tenants of the 51,000 m[sup]2[/sup] building include Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, as well as Royal Dutch Shell, and Vodafone Group. Pearson, which is headquartered in the office, currently leases 58% of the space.
US property investors Westbrook is buying London's Shell-Mex House, an art-deco office building overlooking the Thames river, for about £490 mln (EUR725 mln). The trophy asset in the West End district of London is owned by a consortium including entrepreneurs Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz, David and Simon Reuben, and Jack Dellal. The tenants of the 51,000 m2 building include Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, as well as Royal Dutch Shell, and Vodafone Group. Pearson, which is headquartered in the office, currently leases 58% of the space.
The owners of the building acquired it in 2002 for £327 mln from Lehman Brothers and the Witkoff Group, who in turn had bought it three years earlier from Royal Dutch Shell for £164 mln. Knight Frank advised Westbrook, while CB Richard Ellis acted for the vendors.
This is just the latest example of investors' increasing appetite for large trophy assets. Earlier this week, Quinlan Private's founder Derek Quinlan and Propinvest announced the acquisition of Citigroup's European headquarters in Canary Wharf, London for £1 bn (about EUR 1.4 bn). Real estate investors have acquired 14 single real estate assets worldwide for over $ 1 bn each so far this year - the same number as for all of 2006, and almost five times the level of 2005, according Jones Lang LaSalle's International Capital Group.
