Singapore’s CDL Buys Central London Holiday Inn for $370M

City Developments Ltd has acquired a 706-key Holiday Inn hotel in central London’s Kensington area for £280 million ($370 million), expanding the Singaporean builder’s hospitality footprint in the upscale district.

CDL picked up Holiday Inn London Kensington High Street through the company’s wholly owned Copthorne Hotel subsidiary, the real estate giant said Tuesday in a release. The hotel is two minutes by foot from the posh shopping street in an enclave directly opposite CDL’s Copthorne Tara hotel.

The buy continues a string of deals made recently by the SGX-listed group controlled by billionaire chairman Kwek Leng Beng, including the sale of a central Osaka hotel to Blackstone announced last week. Kwek called the Kensington deal a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure an ultra-prime freehold site in central London.

“Freehold sites in this location are exceptionally scarce, and it is even rarer to find one directly adjacent to our Copthorne Tara hotel,” the CDL chairman said. “With this acquisition, the group will now own two of the largest freehold sites in London’s most affluent Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.”

Heritage Hotel

CDL didn’t name the seller, but a history of the 1936-vintage hotel shows that the property was acquired in 1998 by Cola Holdings, a vehicle of Kurdish businessman Bakir Cola, and underwent a £45 million renovation in 2012 to raise the room count from 550 to the current 706.

The branding deal with Holiday Inn followed in 2016. Cola received £150 million in fresh debt secured by the hotel in 2023 as part of a broader £1.5 billion refinancing package for the family office’s West End property portfolio, according to a statement by Crosstree Real Estate Partners.

CDL’s acquisition price translates to £396,600 ($523,500) per key for Holiday Inn London Kensington High Street, which has seen occupancy of over 97 percent for the nine months to September and is expected to generate a running yield of over 6 percent, according to Tuesday’s announcement.

The acquisition boosts CDL’s presence in central London to over 3,000 hotel rooms, including 833 rooms at Copthorne Tara Hotel London Kensington.

The Kensington High Street sites are a five-minute drive from another Singaporean-owned hotel, Holiday Inn London Kensington Forum, acquired in 2022 by James Koh’s Fragrance Group. The 903-key property is closed for refurbishment and expected to reopen in 2027.

Portfolio Overhaul

The Kensington buy is one of four investments totalling S$1.7 billion ($1.3 billion) made by CDL in 2025, with S$1.2 billion having been allocated to the acquisition of three government land sales sites in Singapore, including a hotly contested plot in the Jurong Lake area.

The group has secured S$1.9 billion in contracted divestments in the year to date as part of capital recycling efforts, the latest being the sale of the 256-key Bespoke Hotel Shinsaibashi to US titan Blackstone for JPY 14 billion ($89.3 million).

CDL sold its half-stake in the South Beach mixed-use development in central Singapore to Malaysia’s IOI Properties for S$2.75 billion in a deal announced in June. Then November saw the sale of the Piccadilly Galleria retail podium in Singapore’s Farrer Park area for S$65.46 million and the divestment of 1250 Lakeside, a 250-unit multi-family asset in California’s Silicon Valley, for $143.5 million.

The group also disclosed last month that it was in talks with potential buyers of its Quayside Isle at Sentosa Cove after putting the waterfront mall up for sale in September.