Barings lines up £134m City office buy
Barings is in talks to buy City office block Capital House, EC4, for £134m, after a stalled 2020 sales process was relaunched this year.
The investment giant is understood to have gone under offer last week to buy the building, which is owned by DWS Group. The deal would represent a mark down from the original £145m price tag.
Agents were appointed to find a buyer for the nine-storey block in November, but the sales process was put on hold when England entered the third national lockdown in January.
Barings is in talks to buy City office block Capital House, EC4, for £134m, after a stalled 2020 sales process was relaunched this year.
The investment giant is understood to have gone under offer last week to buy the building, which is owned by DWS Group. The deal would represent a mark down from the original £145m price tag.
Agents were appointed to find a buyer for the nine-storey block in November, but the sales process was put on hold when England entered the third national lockdown in January.
DWS, which was previously Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm, bought the building in 2010 from Commerz Grundbesitz Investmentgesellschaft, according to Radius Data Exchange, for £92m, reflecting a yield of 5.9%.
Capital House, which sits between Bank and Monument Tube stations at 85 King William Street, EC4, contains about 110,000 sq ft of office space. Tenants include Brookfield Financial, DTZ investors, Alpha Bank London, IT consultant GRT UK, law firm Beale & Company and Mercury Pharma.
It has an average lease expiry of 5.4 years, and brings in £6.87m a year in passing rent, reflecting an average of £53.73 per sq ft. However, 48,700 sq ft of office space is still available, according to leasing agent Savills.
The 0.49-acre island site was developed in 2003, and more than half of the offices have been refurbished in the past five years. It includes two roof terraces overlooking the Bank of England, and around 10,000 sq ft of retail space at ground level.
Barings’s real estate division has roughly £10.4bn of assets under management across the globe. Its UK operation has recently signed a clutch of high-profile tenants at its new Landmark office building in Manchester, including HSBC, Grant Thornton, Allianz and JLL.
Savills is advising Barings on the deal; JLL is advising DWS. All parties declined to comment.
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Photo: Savills
