Legal & General snaps up Spitalfields offices, with management fund portfolio now worth £3.8bn
Legal & General’s investment portfolio has swelled to £3.8bn, with five fresh acquisitions across the office, leisure and industrial sectors.
The new deals total £150m and cover around 600,000sq ft, including the purchase of 20,821 sq ft of offices at 45 Folgate Street in Spitalfields for £26.8m
Through its management fund, L&G has also purchased a major mixed-use institutional asset in Brighton City Centre on Jubilee Street The site includes s49,154 sq ft mixed-use assets with retail units plus office spaces.
The firm has also acquired the Porto Portfolio, comprising six freehold multi-let industrial estates across the East, South East and South West of England. The portfolio contains a total of 403,087 sq ft of industrial space, housing 23 local and national long-term occupiers across 32 units.
L&G also purchased 2 Eastways, an industrial unit in Witham, for £9.25m, in addition to two units at Meadowhall Retail Park in Sheffield for £3.6m.
Rob Codling, senior fund manager at LGIM said “Acquisitions of prime assets across offices, logistics and leisure sectors falls in line with the Managed Fund’s strategy of increasing weightings in these markets. 45 Folgate Street, Jubilee Street, and the Porto Portfolio are exemplary demonstrations of the high-quality investments LGIM Real Assets are pursuing, while the purchases in Witham and Sheffield bring marriage value to the fund through increasing adjoining ownership”.
Separately, property investor Great Portland Estates said that it has signed 17 new lettings deals since the beginning of October, bringing in £5.5 million a year. The estimated rental value is nearly 10 per cent higher than where it was in March 2021, the business said.
Toby Courtauld, chief executive, said: “Absent a resurgence of the pandemic, our confidence is building for the remainder of 2022, as we expect the combination of economic growth, a return to normal trading conditions and central London’s magnetic appeal to be positive for our markets.”
Shares in the business had fallen by 0.2 per cent by Monday afternoon.