CK Asset Said Selling London UBS HQ to NPS-LaSalle Vehicle for $1.65B

CK Asset Holdings has found a buyer for its 5 Broadgate complex in London, with Bloomberg reporting on Friday that Korea’s NPS has agreed to buy the office asset, which serves as UBS’s London headquarters, for around £1.25 billion ($1.65 billion) through a LaSalle Investment Management vehicle.

The acquisition of the property by the Korean pension organisation, which has some $778 billion in assets under management, is its second major investment in London in the last three months and its third major buy globally within the same interval, after the NPS committed to a $2.5 billion San Francisco project in October.

The NPS-LaSalle offer won out over competing bids by Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Company and mainland billionaire Du Shuanghua’s Bright Ruby Resources to win the rights to the 700,000 square foot (65,032 square metre) complex in the Bishopsgate Without area of the City of London, according to a report in the UK’s Estates Gazette.

The deal comes as a boom in London office investments is bringing Asian capital flocking to the city, with Singapore’s Sun Venture said last week to be buying a freehold asset from WeWork and Hong Kong’s Kerry Properties having snatched up a West End office block for $199 million in September.

CK Asset Finds an Exit

The property developer controlled by Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, had reportedly been looking for a buyer for 5 Broadgate since June of this year, with CK Asset said at the time to have set a minimum price of £1 billion for the six-year-old property.

Sometimes referred to as a “groundscraper”, the 13-storey building, which includes 12 office floors, is leased to UBS through at least 2035 and forms part of the 4.7 million square foot Broadgate commercial complex developed by LSE-listed British Land.

CK Asset had acquired the property, which was built to suit for UBS, from British Land and GIC for £1 billion in June 2018. At the reported compensation, the developer is receiving approximately £1,786 per square foot for 5 Broadgate.

The Hong Kong-listed developer has yet to make a statement on the reported sale, and inquiries by Mingtiandi remained unanswered at the time of publication. Colliers International had represented CK Asset in the sale.

Korean Shopping Spree

The NPS was a primary contributor to what property agency Savills referred to as a record-breaking September for the investment market in the City of London, when the Korean fund’s partnership with Hines and local player Lipton Rogers Developments agreed to pay approximately £200 million for a site at 18 Blackfriars Road in the financial district.

That investment, which gives the new owners rights to an already-approved project including a 32-storey office tower, a 53-storey residential structure and a 324-key hotel, helped bring total transactions in the district that month to over £1 billion. For the first three quarters of 2021, Savills reported £5.35 billion in investment in the City of London, which is 14 percent above the five-year average for the district during the period.

During the same month that it committed to the London deal with Hines, the NPS also teamed up with the Houston-based developer and fund manager to announce a $2.5 billion redevelopment project for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company campus in San Francisco’s South Financial district.

In July, the NPS agreed to pay $900 million to acquire Lendlease’s Melbourne Quarter Tower in the capital of Australia’s Victoria state for $900 million.

The NPS also has some history working with LaSalle, after the Chicago-based fund manager purchased Goldman Sachs’s European headquarters at Plumtree Court in the City of London on the Korean fund’s behalf in 2018. Media reports at the time indicated that Goldman Sachs received £1.2 billion for the property, which it continues to occupy.