Westfield Corporation has offloaded an office tower that sits above its Stratford City mall in London for £70 million ($135m).
British property investment managers Tristan Capital Partners purchased the building on behalf of its recently launched Curzon Capital Partners IV fund.
Located a No 1 Stratford Place, the A-grade building was developed in 2011.
The eight-level office tower sits atop the shopping centre in east London.
Spanning just shy of 12,000sqm, the building is home to Network Rail, London Legacy Development Corporation and Coral Racing.
Westfield owns a 50 per cent stake in the centre, while Holland’s ABP Pension Fund and Canada’s CPP Investment Board each own 25 per cent stakes.
All up Westfield and its partners developed over 100,000sq m of office/retail space on top of the sprawling centre.
Westfield’s two London malls — Stratford City and London — have been star performers for the company with the two centres delivering net property income of GBP61m for the six months to December last year. This represents a 12 per cent increase in income on the prior corresponding half on a like-for-like basis. Buoying the centre’s sales has been a rejuvenation of the precinct since Stratford City was opened to coincide with the London Olympics in 2012.
The area is expected to soon house an additional 5000 homes, further fuelling the east London mall’s sales growth.
While the deal is small in terms of the quantum of Westfield’s usual transactions, the sale demonstrates the company’s nimbleness, a fund manager who declined to be named said.
In February, Westfield struck a $US925m joint venture agreement with US fund manager O’Connor Capital Partners.
Under the deal, O’Connor purchased half stakes in three US malls owned by Westfield.
The O’Connor deal was the company’s first major transaction since undergoing a restructure last year that saw it spin off its Australian and New Zealand businesses into a new entity known as Scentre.
There is ongoing speculation Westfield will conduct a further restructure by hiving off its second tier, regional malls in the US into a new company. However, Westfield has strongly rejected this speculation.
Scentre too has been mooted as a seller of its office properties which include Westfield Towers in Sydney. However earlier this year, Scentre chief executive Peter Allen told The Australian the company was no longer pursuing the sale of the Westfield office towers in the Sydney CBD.
This article first appeared in The Australian Business Review