Heavyweights line up for £250m White City Place

Canadian pension fund Cadillac Fairview, GIC, Hong Kong’s Peterson Group and Great Portland Estates are battling it out to buy a 17-acre campus in west London. The four are understood to have made it through to the second round in the race to buy the 966,290 sq ft White City Place, W12. Stanhope, Mitsui Fudosan and AIMCo put its lease, which runs until 2035, over the 17-acre site up for sale with Eastdil Secured for around £250m. The campus comprises six buildings – the WestWorks, MediaWorks, the Garden House, Television Centre, Energy Centre and Lighthouse building. Tenants include the BBC, ITV Studios, YOOX Net-A-Porter, The Royal College of Art and Huckletree. Cosmetics giant L’Oréal is set to move to the scheme. The BBC sold and sublet its Media Village site to Stanhope, Mitsui Fudosan and AIMCo in 2015 as it looked to reduce the size and cost of its estate. Under the terms of the agreement, the BBC received £87m for the four acres of freehold land and the lease of six buildings, including the three it occupies. Since 2015, Stanhope, Mitsui Fudosan and AIMCo have turned Television Centre into 432 flats and new office space at the site and refurbished the WestWorks, MediaWorks and the Garden House. The scheme is at the heart of an ambitious £8bn, 110-acre regeneration of the wider White City area, which has been designated a development opportunity area by Hammersmith and Fulham Council. If Cadillac Fairview was to buy the site it would mark a major return to the UK for the Canadian pension fund manager. It was last active here in 2014, when it sold its 50% share in Thomas More Square to Landsec for £85.3m. To send feedback, e-mail louise.dransfield@egi.co.uk or tweet @DransfieldL or @estatesgazette