It has been recently announced that an office block in the heart of the capital has just been sold for a whopping £300 million in total.
Who has bought the offices?
The offices, designed by Sir Terry Farrell, are a postmodern office block that has been purchased by two investment firms.
The acquisition, managed by Blackstone, is a joint venture between the property investment division of King Street Capital Management (which is a hedge fund with its headquarters based in New York) and the London-based investment management company Arax Properties. The property acquisition has been funded through the US-based private equity group, Apollo Global Management.
Where is the office block located?
These offices, which are a block compromising of a staggering 22 storeys in total, are based in the City of London, and it is known as the Alban Gate building.
Big-name businesses in the office block
In this office space in London, the block is home to a number of large corporations. This includes firms such as the Lloyds Banking Group.
Positive growth for office space investment
This recent high-value acquisition is a great start to 2020 for the office property investment market.
It marks a much better start to the year compared to investment for the year previously. For example, according to the property adviser CBRE, investment overall for this sector was £11.3 billion in total.
This means that investment in the property market was down by over 36 percent in the previous year. One of the reasons that were attributed to this decline in investment was due to the growing uncertainty regarding Brexit and what would be the outcome.
Increase in office sales activity
Since the results of the General Election at the end of December 2019, there has been a considerable rise in office sales activity, with investors more confident in the future of the UK property market.
Experts in this sector have predicted that there will be considerably more transactions in the following year compared to 2019.