Archive for the ‘Commercial property’ Category

Irish property crash: full list of 850 Nama properties up for sale

Friday, July 29th, 2011

A massive firesale of 850 properties has been launched by Ireland’s bad bank, including pubs in Somerset, apartment blocks in Canary Wharf and hotels in Cork

The National Asset Management Agency, which has been tasked with clearing the mountain of bad debt amassed by Ireland’s property developers, has launched a firesale of 850 properties including pubs in Somerset, towers blocks in Canary Wharf and golf courses in Ireland.

The bad bank has just published a full list of properties across the UK and Ireland that are effectively up for sale, having been placed in receivership. It has already been inundated with hundreds of calls from bargain hunters.

The full list is available here.

Some 32% of the list is in the UK and includes properties in all parts of the country. Properties in Ireland include golf courses, five-star hotels, medical centres, homes in Dublin’s salubrious Ballsbridge district and an airport in county Kildare.

At the top end of the list are trophy buildings in London including the flagship Louis Vuitton store in New Bond Street and a site destined for a Norman Foster-designed tower in the Docklands.

The tower is yet to be developed but was put into receivership earlier this year alongside a 28-storey block called the Forge, also in the Docklands.

At the bottom end are holiday homes on the Isle of Wight, a car park in Bangor, north Wales, and an off licence on Alexandra Park Road in Muswell Hill in north London.

The spreadsheet issued by Nama will be updated every month and shows the scale of the havoc caused by Ireland’s property boom.

NAMA revealed that three of the top developers are responsible for €8.4bn of the debt

Those interested in buying a house or apartment in London could do well to check the list for potential knock-down prices.

There are residential properties on Cromwell Road, Clapham Common, Hampstead, Gloucester Road and whole apartment blocks on the Isle of Dogs.

Commercial investors will already be casting their eye over some of the sites, which hit the headlines when they were put into receivership earlier this year including Odeon Cinema West End in Leicester Square. The cinema building was owned by a consortium of three Irish entrepreneurs, including former Ireland rugby manager Pat Whelan, and was once valued at more than £200m.

David Daly’s Louis Vuitton building and some other of his London property has already generated much interest after the developer was given 48 hours to clear his debts by Nama earlier this month.

Other UK properties include the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Shoreditch High Street, three sites on Westferry Road in London’s Docklands, residential blocks across London and pubs in Weston-Super-Mare, Hambridge (both Somerset) and Seascale, Cumbria.

Also featuring on the list are sites in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Essex, Kent, Isle of Wight, Leeds, Maidenhead, Plymouth, Salford, Sussex, Tyne & Wear, Warrington, West Yorkshire, Wigan, Wakefield and Wolverhampton.

In Ireland, the damage caused by broke developers is even greater with huge swathes of residential developments in Dublin and Cork now in receivership.

The majority of the properties, 220, are in Dublin, while 80 are in Cork and 52 in Limerick. The properties are for the most part houses, apartments and development properties.

Prime retail units in Dublin’s best known shopping district – the Grafton Street area – are up for grabs with pubs and offices on South William Street and Drury Street and Grafton Street itself.

A house on millionaire’s row Ailesbury Road is on the list as are prime office units in the same area of Ballsbridge. There is also a choice list of hotels including one on Fota Island in Cork and the Portmarnock Hotel and Golf Links in Co Dublin.

The list was released on the Nama website as the agency unveiled its annual results.

It revealed it had set aside almost €1.5bn last year to cover further write-downs on €71bn of loans it had acquired from five Irish banks.

“We’ve made enormous progress on a wide range of fronts over the past 15 months, and we’re ahead of schedule in respect of many areas,” said the agency’s chief executive Brendan McDonagh.

“Our expectation now is that the pace of activity will step up again in the months ahead as we move through the implementation phase of our work.”

Last year, Nama acquired 11,500 loans of 850 debtors from the five participating institutions. It paid €30.2bn for nominal loan balances of €71.2bn, a 58% discount.


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British Land pre-lets third of Cheesegrater tower

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

US-based insurance firm Aon will lease the bottom 10 floors of the 47-storey Leadenhall Building when it is completed in 2014

British Land has pre-let nearly a third of its Cheesegrater skyscraper to Aon, stealing a march on rival Land Securities.

The Chicago-based insurance firm will lease 191,000 square feet in the 610,000 sq ft Leadenhall Building, which is still under construction in the City of London. The deal will see Aon taking up the lower 10 floors in the 47-storey tower to house its UK headquarters.

“This is the first evidence of large City occupiers signing up to unbuilt accommodation ahead of lease expiries at their existing holdings,” said Oriel analyst Charlie Foster. “We don’t think there is a lot of expansionary demand at the moment. Demand comes from people relocating due to lease expiries.”

Aon is understood to have agreed to pay rent of around £55 per sq ft. If it exercised an option to lease five extra floors, 45% of the £340m building would be pre-let.

Aon, whose lease at its current base in Devonshire Square expires in 2014, had also been in talks with developer Land Securities about leasing a slice of its Walkie Talkie tower in Fenchurch Street. But the insurer, which sponsors Manchester United, wanted to be next to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market in Leadenhall Street.

Construction on the Cheesegrater and the Walkie Talkie started in January and both skyscrapers will be among the tallest in the City when they are completed in mid-2014.

“We would now expect British Land to hold off on pre-letting the remaining floors in order to capture some of the further rental growth expected in the City market,” said Matrix analyst Alison Watson.

Several firms, including UK fund manager Schroders and Spanish bank Santander are looking for new office space.

A British Land spokesman said: “This is very good news, not just for British Land, but for the wider market. This is a big financial services company committing to London in the same way JP Morgan did in December and others look to be doing.”

A Land Securities spokesman was unperturbed, saying the developer was “happy to take [the Walkie Talkie] forward as a speculative build” as the group was not reliant on pre-lets to secure funding, unlike others.

Elsewhere in central London, the 82-metre Marble Arch tower overlooking Hyde Park was acquired for £80m by Almacantar, the property investment firm founded by former Land Securities director Mike Hussey. It is his third big deal this year, after buying the Centre Point tower at Tottenham Court Road and being chosen by the Marylebone Cricket Club to redevelop Lord’s Cricket Ground.


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One Hyde Park flat is sold for £136m

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Nick and Christian Candy sell the Knightsbridge home for a record price in their new London development

It is the perfect London pied-à-terre for a non-dom tycoon about town. A three-storey penthouse overlooking Hyde Park has been sold for £136m – becoming by far the most expensive flat ever bought in Britain.

An unnamed buyer, using lawyers in Ukraine, has bought two apartments in the newly opened One Hyde Park development in Knightsbridge that have been knocked into one to create a 25,000 sq ft (2,300 sq m) penthouse with a wine cellar and access to room service at the neighbouring Mandarin Oriental hotel, according to documents filed last week at the Land Registry.

The price eclipses the value of landmark properties elsewhere in the world. In Beverly Hills, the 3.7 acre Hearst mansion, where John and Jacqueline Kennedy honeymooned, is on the market for just $95m (£58m). And in Manhattan, luxury apartments in the Plaza hotel overlooking Central Park cost a little over $50m.

One Hyde Park has been developed by thirtysomething brothers Nick and Christian Candy, who began their property career with a £6,000 loan from their grandmother, and who have been involved in several other luxury projects, including an aborted scheme to build on the site of London’s Chelsea Barracks.

Nick Candy said that 45 flats in the development have sold so far for a total of £963m – an average of £22m each: “No one else has achieved that – not just in London, but anywhere in the world,” he said. The £136m sale was agreed several years ago, but has only just been formally documented by the Land Registry. For the same amount, the buyer could have bought 1,564 houses in Burnley, the Lancashire town recently named as Britain’s cheapest, with an average property price of £87,194.

The penthouse was purchased as an empty shell, and the buyer is spending £60m fitting it out. Neighbours will be a multicultural bunch – purchasers already identified include the Kazakh copper billionaire Vladimir Kim, the prime minister of Qatar and Irish developer Ray Grehan.

“There’s a lot of Indian and Chinese money in London and we’re doing a lot of deals with Middle Easterners,” said Candy, adding that buyers are investing in London and elsewhere following unrest in nations such as Egypt, Bahrain and Syria. “Because of the turmoil, they need to find a safe place for their money,” he said.


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Rinat Akhmetov pays record £136.4m for apartment at One Hyde Park

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Ukraine’s richest man spends record amount for a UK home after buying two Knightsbridge flats totalling 25,000 sq ft

Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, has paid the highest price for a UK residence, buying an apartment in the One Hyde Park development in Knightsbridge.

Land Registry documents show that two properties on the seventh and eighth floor of the luxury development have been bought by a single buyer, the total consideration amounting to £136.4m.

Confirmation of the sale had been expected for some time, with news that a purchaser had paid the huge sum emerging last year. It has been estimated that the buyer would also be spending £60m fitting out the property.

A spokesman for Akhmetov’s company, System Capital Management, confirmed the oligarch had invested in the development, which has caused uproar among local residents because of its modern architecture.

Akhmetov, the son of a coal miner, runs SCM, a Ukrainian conglomerate involved in mining, retail, financial services and even football – it owns the club Shakhtar Donetsk.

Estimates of his fortune vary, although most agree he is worth billions of pounds. As the owner of Metinvest, a coal, ore-mining and steel business, his net worth is likely to have soared over the past year on the back of the commodities boom, with Forbes recently estimating his fortune at $16bn (£10bn).

Buyers of flats in One Hyde Park are treated as permanent guests of the Mandarin Oriental, the hotel adjacent to the development. As well as outlining the property bought in each case, each lease document also specifies which area of the development’s wine cellar the buyer is entitled to. Akhmetov will be able to store his collection of fine wines in wine storage spaces 16 and 17.

The flat is reported as having an area of 25,000 square feet, meaning the Ukrainian billionaire has spent £5,456 a square foot.

That is less than the absolute peak figures the developers, Nick and Christian Candy, had hoped for – with the highest flats with the best views of Hyde Park expected to go for as much as £6,000 a square foot.

The brothers are unlikely to be too bothered, however. Total sales of about half the flats have reaped £963m, the Candys have indicated, enough to almost pay off the £1.1bn cost of the development.


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