PROPERTY DEAL Sponsored by
OF THE YEAR
Winner:
Bath Road, Slough (SEGRO)
Following dessert, David Gower announced that £7,742 had been donated by guests to help boost the Alexander Devine Children’s Hospice Service charity. The lucky draw winners of the Royal Ascot prize – judging panel chairman Matthew Battle and Terry Tedder of Bovis Homes both also kindly donated their prize to the charity for future fundraising.
And then Gower announced the three Commercial Property Deal of the Year finalists:
• Bath Road, Slough • Number 1 Forbury Place, Reading • Green Park, Reading
Bath Road, Slough – SEGRO office portfolio disposal and related acquisitions
Over the past four years SEGRO has made a major corporate shift, focusing on industrial and logistics property and moving away from office ownership.
In June 2015, SEGRO sold its 972,000 sq ft Bath Road office portfolio to investment fund AEW Europe for £325 million – the largest office transaction in the South East market for two years. The sale provided cash for SEGRO’s acquisition and redevelopment of prime industrial sites: 225 Bath Road, Slough, the 13.5-acre ex-production facility of Sara Lee; and adjacent Bracknell sites – the former 12.64-acre BMW HQ and a 6.5-acre site owned by Boehringer Ingelheim.
No 1 Forbury Place, Reading – SSE letting
This 186,000 sq ft deal was the largest Thames Valley office letting for 15 years. M&G, owner of the seven storey No 1 Forbury Place, was keen to secure a quality tenant for the entire building, prior to its practical completion. M&G/Bell Hammer and their letting team of Campbell Gordon
businessmag.co.uk
and CBRE agreed a 15-year lease deal with FTSE 100 company Scottish & Southern Energy, enabling SSE to consolidate its offices from the South Coast, Basingstoke, Thatcham and Reading to a central hub.
Green Park, Reading – Oxford Properties lettings to Thales and Bayer
Green Park is home to 6,500 staff from wide-ranging international corporations. In January, two more major occupiers made long-term leasing commitments and moved their UK headquarters to the Reading business park. Aerospace, defence, and security provider Thales signed a 20-year lease for 111,064 sq ft, and global life sciences group Bayer leased 80,000 sq ft for 15 years. Green Park owner Oxford Properties was assisted by Cushman & Wakefield and Campbell Gordon with JLL acting on behalf of the occupiers.
Neil Seager, partner at category sponsor Haslams, the Thames Valley property experts, opened the traditional award envelope to reveal the winner as “a strategic deal that revitalised prime sites and brought about key ownership changes” – SEGRO’s Bath Road, Slough deal.
Oliver White and Carol Rix of the SEGRO team received the award trophy.
White, SEGRO’s business unit FD of Thames Valley national logistics, explained later: “This was SEGRO’s last significant office holding so it enabled us to re-focus as a wholly industrial, income-focused REIT.
“We were very pleased to achieve this very large deal. It was a great Thames Valley team effort among all involved, across industrial, investment, asset management, and finance.”
The mould-breaking deal also realised funds for SEGRO’s new role.
“Focused on our industrial product, we have continued to invest within the Thames Valley, particularly in Slough, Reading and Bracknell,” added White.
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – JUNE 2016
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