Fubon Life is paying £332.5m (€363m) for London tourist attraction Madame Tussauds.
The board of Secure Income REIT said it has exchanged contracts with the Taiwanese insurer to sell the asset in the third quarter of this year.
Secure Income said Fubon Life, which is being advised by Patrizia Immobilien’s UK office, is paying an 8% premium to the property’s December 2014 valuation of £309.3m.
The property is let to Merlin Attractions Operations, owner and operator of Madame Tussauds for at least the next 27 years, with the option for the tenant to extend by up to a further 70 years upon expiry.
Merlin currently pays £15.7m a year in rent on the asset, which has never been sold.
Fubon Life last year bought a London office property for £139m from LondonMetric Property. Early last year, Fubon Life said it was targeting European real estate for its first overseas investment in the asset class.
The insurer, a unit of Taiwan’s second-largest financial holding company, has “a close working relationship” with some local advisers in Europe, according Howard Lin, CIO at Fubon Financial Holdings.
Taiwanese peer, Cathay Life Insurance, recently bought a prime London office asset from a developer owned by Ares Management and Delancey. The Taiwanese institutional investor paid £575m for the Walbrook Building in London’s City district.
The deal followed Cathay Life’s £320m purchase last year of the Woolgate Exchange building from private equity firm TPG and Ivanhoé Cambridge.
