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JV buys London office building for £106M; Student Castle to sell UK assets

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JV buys London office building for £106M; Student Castle to sell UK assets

* Brockton Everlast and Quoinstone Investment Management purchased a 124,000-square-foot office building, dubbed Telephone House, at 69-77 Paul St. in London for £106 million in an off-market deal, Property Week reported. The asset, which is fully let to multiple tenants including publications Drapers and the Nursing Times, has a current passing rent of £4.75 million, with 17% of the rent coming from fashion business Karen Millen, the report added.

* According to PW, student accommodation firm Student Castle Ltd. appointed Savills to sell its portfolio comprising seven assets around the U.K. for up to £450 million. Savills was Vita Group's adviser on the sale of student housing assets to DWS for roughly £600 million.

Student Castle's projects are in Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Bath and York, with two other developments in Brighton and Oxford scheduled for completion with the coming 12 months, according to the report.

UK and Ireland

* ICAMAP Investments SÀRL, a member of a consortium seeking to acquire London-based budget hotel operator easyHotel PLC, agreed to acquire 2,595,724 shares of the latter at the offer price of 95 pence per share. The consortium, which includes Ivanhoé Cambridge Inc. unit Cadim Fonds Inc., will hold or have received acceptances representing more than 50% of easyHotel shares once the ICAMAP acquisition closes. The acquisition is expected to close on Aug. 23.

* Foreign investors accounted for 56% of the total €8.5 billion worth of office investment transactions in Dublin since 2013, with the largest chunk of direct investment coming from U.S. buyers at 23%, followed by Europe at 19%, Asia 10% and the U.K. at 4%, the Irish Independent reported, citing a Knight Frank Ireland research report.

British investors sold €362 million worth of Dublin offices since 2013, €35.8 million more than the €327 million they invested in acquiring those properties, the report noted.

* The GeoView Commercial Vacancy report highlighted a rise in commercial property vacancies across Ireland, with 28,063 commercial units vacant in the state as of July-end, the Irish Independent reported. Eighteen Irish counties reported an increase in vacancy rates, up from nine in the second quarter of 2018, with the highest vacancy rates observed in the west region of the country, the survey said.

* LondonMetric Property PLC declared a 5.3% increase in its quarterly interim dividend to 2.0 pence per share. The dividend, which is the first for fiscal year 2019/20, will be paid Oct. 7 to shareholders on record as of Aug. 30.

* Savills placed a 60.9-acre residential and open space landholding in Drogheda, Ireland, for a guide price of around €1.5 million, the Irish Independent reported. The site is zoned for residential and recreational uses.

* One Housing secured a mix of secured and unsecured finance amounting to £150 million from North American and British investors that will aid the social housing firm's plans to develop 5,000 new homes over the coming 10 years, IPE Real Assets reported. The firm manages 17,000 homes.

Greece and Poland

* Secure Property Development & Investment PLC closed the sale of its Victini Logistics Park & Photovoltaic Park in Greece to Brook Lane Capital for €12.5 million.

* According to research by Colliers International, office vacancy in the Polish capital, Warsaw, decreased from 14% to 8.5% in the last 2.5 years, with only 500,000 square meters of corporate space delivered to the market during the period, PropertyEU reported.

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