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For Real Estate Investors, London Is Calling
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There is a battle brewing in the ashes of the British property market. Liberty International, a London-based real-estate investment trust that specializes in shopping malls, appears to be the subject of a takeover battle between U.S.-based Simon Property Group and Australian-based Westfield Group. The rumble in the City comes as property prices in Britain have fallen dramatically and could be a sign that a bottom has materialized in certain market segments. British property stocks have seen their value cut in half since REITs were first introduced in the country in January 2007. Liberty, which owns London’s famed Covent Garden, has fared better than most of its counterparts, falling just 22 percent during the same time period. The stock may have held its ground as others crumbled due to its primary investment in shopping centers and active buying from opportunistic suitors.
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The Duke of Westminster's property company Grosvenor is developing a framework
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The Duke of Westminster's property company Grosvenor is developing a framework to lock in specialist contractors for work on its 120 ha London estate. The £12.9 billion development and investment firm has more than 760 properties across the estate, which encompasses upmarket Mayfair and Belgravia and has been under the management of the Grosvenor family for 330 years. Project management director Stephen Brewer said the company now wanted to enter a formal arrangement with specialist contractors so as to have "a consistency of approach". He said Grosvenor had established a three-year renewal framework for general building works across the estate last year, which was won by Renew subsidiary Walter Lilly and property management firm Grangewood.
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Pinoys laud CREBA real estate fair in London
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London-based Filipinos the Manila-based Chamber of Real Estate Builders Association (CREBA) for recently organizing a real estate fair in coordnation with the Philippine embassy. They said that the fair introduced them to the industry and provided them with more options and information in purchasing houses and lots in the Philippines. "Natutuwa kami at dumating ang CREBA at ipinaliwanag ang kanilang mga housing at real estate projects sa Pilipinas at nakakaenganyo ang kanilang mga sinabi lalo na sa mga overseas foreign workers na nasa Europe," said nurse Rolando Sotelo of the Philippine Nurses Association-UK. A total of 12 groups from CREBA participated in the event and showed overseas Filipino workers presentations of the real-estate industry in the Philippines.
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Forced sales loom over UK property scene
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LONDON, July 14 (Reuters) - Britain's economic slowdown heralds a wave of forced commercial property sales that could yet tip a downturn in real estate markets into a 1990s-style property crash. Some new buildings could be left empty, while others could be taken over by creditors, causing the all-too familiar drag effect that haunted the industry for more than a decade last time around. It took almost 13 years for UK commercial property values to regain their 1989 highs, according to Investment Property Databank. Far fewer new offices are going up in London than was the case almost 20 years ago, and creditor banks have learned that foreclosure can make a bad property situation worse, but property derivative traders sense trouble ahead as occupier demand begins to wilt. Much like UK housing index derivatives, commercial property index derivatives have priced in expectations of a total drop in values of about 35 percent from last summer peaks to 2010/11. Insolvency experts are also gearing up for an expected surge in commercial property-related business, even though any debt-related distress has so far been limited to overstretched buy-to-let speculators and regional residential developers.
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Huntons builds real estate with LG hire
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Marshall, who will head Hunton’s City property offering, joined this week from LG, where she has been a partner since 2002. Prior to joining LG, Marshall worked at Scots leader McGrigor Donald as well as a stint in-house at Pearl Assurance. Her clients include Scottish Mutual Assurance, for which she advised on the sale of 81-100 Kings Road, Chelsea, to Allied Irish Bank for £55m. She also advised Scottish Mutual Assurance on the sale of 11 The Strand, which comprised a freehold mixed office and retail building totalling approximately 47,167 sq ft. Her other clients include Zurich Assurance, Halifax Bank of Scotland and Capmark.
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London property prices tumble
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Property prices in London have continued to fall as the slump in value intensifies, according to a leading property consultancy. The price drop accelerated in June and properties in the capital are now worth 1.7 per cent less than they were in May, said Knight Frank. Amounting to a loss of 3.1 per cent in value over the last three months – the largest quarterly fall since 2002 - the trend is expected to continue.
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From the Gulf, Money for Towers in London
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A Kuwaiti fund recently spent £400 million ($783 million) to buy the Willis Building, one of the tallest in the square-mile financial district, and plans to invest even more here. Qatar, the sultanate of Oman, and Arab Investments — a secretive London-based fund — are also investing in skyscrapers that will transform the City, as the district is known, over the next three years. London has a long history of welcoming foreigners and their money, but the City is particularly eager for investment now because the credit crisis threatens to slow several projects.
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Why the City of London is right to fear Dubai
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Senior figures in the United Kingdom government are increasingly concerned about the rise of Dubai as a financial centre and what it might mean for the future of the City of London. They fear that a combination of huge oil surpluses in the Middle East and a relatively low-cost business hub, regulated with a common law legal system, may prove an irresistible lure to financial executives struggling with soaring costs in a global recession. Last week Standard Chartered chief economist Gerald Lyons told journalists in Dubai that he had recently been in a meeting with senior members of the UK government where, for the first time in his experience, genuine concern over the mounting competition from Dubai as a financial centre was expressed "at the highest levels".
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Agent's false claims on £1m homes
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Its website says: 'We walk down the best streets in London on a daily basis, Cadogan Square, Eaton Square, Eaton Place, Chesham Place, Cadogan Place, Lennox Gardens and Egerton Gardens. We think of these addresses as being 'our' streets.' But records show Egerton Roche was set up last October and 2 Eaton Gate is an accommodation address. The real offices appear to be miles away in Kennington.
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London City Office Rents Will Fall 40%
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Rental prices for office space in London's main financial district will fall at least 40 percent from their peak before recovering, the London-based Times newspaper reported, citing property investor Chris Bartram. Developers such as Land Securities Group Plc will scale back or delay some large planned buildings and move tenants to newer properties, and the current decline will be shorter than the four-year slide that began in 1991, the Times quoted Bartram as saying in an interview. There are international investors with ``a lot of cash'' who are looking to invest in U.K. commercial property, he told the Times. Bartram, former chief executive of Dutch real estate company Haslemere NV, has set up a 300 million-pound ($595 million) investment fund, partially bankrolled by the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, the Times said.
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The $1.5 Million Studio
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Using data from London-based real estate group Knight Frank, BusinessWeek.com identified the 20 most expensive markets in the world and what you can buy in those cities' prime areas with $1.5 million. In London, where at $6,191 the average price per square foot is the highest in the world, your $1.5 million would buy only a small studio in the smartest parts of town. In Venice, on the other hand, despite limited building space, your money goes a bit further, getting you a two-bedroom apartment or more near the Grand Canal. (Of course, in less illustrious neighborhoods, your money goes further still.)
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British Land faces tough year as London slows
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British Land saw £1.9bn wiped off the value of its net assets as it fell victim to the fall in the underlying commercial property market. Although the UK's second largest real estate investment trust (Reit) outperformed the market, it still saw the value of its net holdings drop 20pc to £6.9bn. The company made a loss before tax of £1.6bn. Underlying profit, which strips out changes in property valuation, was up 10.5pc at £284m. British Land has seen £1.9bn wiped off the value of its assets as the downturn in the commercial property market persists. British Land's 201 Bishopsgate and The Broadgate Tower in the City of London
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South Africans ease gloom in the City of London
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It will take 107,000 sq ft at the 240,000 sq ft building which completes in September. The bank, advised by Spring 4, will relocate from its existing office at Cannon Bridge House where it has a lease expiry in September 2009. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but it is thought to have agreed a rent of around £57.50/sq ft on a 10 year lease. The deal will be a significant boost to the City of London occupational market which has seen little letting activity in deals of more than 50,000 sq ft since the start of the year.
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Banks play UK real estate debt roulette
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Banks are playing with fire by delaying foreclosure on UK commercial property borrowers who are in breach of their loan terms. Property finance professionals say hundreds of loans secured against many millions of pounds of commercial properties are in breach of terms called loan-to-value covenants the result of a 16 percent nosedive in values since last summer's market peak. These covenants tie the loans to a percentage of the value of the asset they are secured against. Breaches triggered swift foreclosures and repossessions in previous downturns. This time many lenders are waiving those rights for fear of being saddled with assets they can't sell.
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UK House Prices Fall On Yr 1st Time Since 06
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U.K. house prices posted their first annual decline in more than two years in April as economic uncertainty and the global credit crisis further reduced activity in the residential property market, housing valuation company Hometrack said Monday. House prices fell an average 0.6% in April, the seventh consecutive monthly fall, after dipping 0.2% in March, it said. On the year, prices fell 0.9% after rising 0.4% in March, the first drop since February 2006 and the weakest performance since they slumped 1.0% in January 2006. "While the availability of finance is impacting on demand in certain segments, the reality is that weak confidence is effectively resulting in a buyers strike with households sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see how events unfold," Hometrack Director of Research Richard Donnell said in a statement.
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The experts views on mortgages and the housing market
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The average asking price for a home in the UK is now £239,521, just 1.3 per cent higher than a year ago, according to Rightmove, the property website. Rightmove says that asking prices have dropped 0.1 per cent in the past month, a sharp contrast to average increases of 2.8 per cent recorded each April since 2002. House prices across the Bidwells region - Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and North Essex - fell 3.8 per cent on average.
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Vacant Homes in U.K. Prove Speculator Nightmare
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April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Lee spent 5.3 million pounds ($10 million) buying 20 rental homes across the U.K. with just 150,000 pounds of his own money. Today, the properties are worth about 60 percent less and owned by the banks that financed the purchases. Lee was one of thousands enticed by one of Europe's top five best-performing residential property markets during the past decade. Now repossessions are mounting and properties stand empty as many investors fail to find the tenants needed to cover their mortgages after a building boom flooded cities, especially Leeds and Manchester, with apartments. The unraveling buy-to-rent investment market contributed to a 2.5 percent drop in home prices last month, the biggest since 1992, a report by mortgage lender HBOS Plc shows.
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At least 4,000 U.K. real-estate agents may shut their doors
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At least 4,000 U.K. real-estate agents from the 12,000 estimated to be in business may shut their doors by next year because of the collapse of the real- estate market, the London-based Times reported, citing Robin King, a director of real-estate agent network Movewithus. The network's sales have dropped between 30 percent and 50 percent since last year, the newspaper said. The Property Shop, an east England-based real estate agency, shut nine of its 10 offices and dismissed about 30 employees in April, just before its parent company, Alexander Partnership, went into administration, the newspaper said.
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UAE investors get opportunity to buy property in London’s billionaire' row
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London real estate - Barratt, leading real estate developer and house builder in the UK, has offered international investors including UAE investors the chance to buy a property on London’s ‘billionaire’s row’-The Bishops Avenue. Barratt has launched the latest homes to be built on ‘The Bishops Avenue’ named Allingham Court, a development of 12 exclusive apartments within 2 mansion-style houses. Allingham Court is situated in one-and-a-half acres of private and exquisitely landscaped gardens on the highly coveted western side of The Bishops Avenue. The development offers 10 three-bedroom residences and the 2 penthouses each providing between 2,500 and 6,000 sq ft of living space.
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Property slowdown: even London feels pinch
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The number of houses being sold in London is at its lowest level for more than a decade, research shows today. Sellers have been forced to shave hundreds of thousands of pounds off asking prices as a result. In one case, a house in Paultons Square, Chelsea, has had £250,000 cut off its original asking price of £3.5m in a bid to find a buyer. About 9,000 properties were sold in the capital in the first three months of this year. Last year, homes were being sold at the rate of 16,000 a month. According to property information website mouseprice.net, sales have been slower than in any period since 1995.
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House price growth down again
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The average cost of a home in England and Wales rose by just 5.3% during the 12 months to the end of February, the slowest rate of gain since July 2006, according to the Land Registry. At the same time monthly house price growth stalled, with the average value of a property remaining unchanged at £185,616. The overall figure masked more gloomy regional variations, with house prices falling in seven out of 10 regions during the month.
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The super rich and super prime real estate in London
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The super rich and super prime real estate in London seems to be immune to the effects of the credit crunch. This was clearly demonstrated by two property developers’ brothers Christian and Nicholas Candy who both just made 250 million pounds on property bought just 18 months ago. Candy and Candy sold two hotels located in fashionable Kensington London, both hotels overlook Kensington Gardens and were sold for a cool 320 million pounds. The Kensington Palace and Kensington Park Hotels site were sold to a Middle East consortium. The brothers had barely started work on the project and had planned to transform the hotel into super prime real estate. The hotels would have housed 97 apartments with price tags of 10 million pounds each.
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A survey has found that London is becoming unpopular with investors due to rocketing house prices
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Estate agent Knight Frank recently said house prices in the capital were rising at a rate of more than 30% annually during 2007. The Urban Land Institute (ULI), which concentrates on the use of urban land in order to enhance the total environment, has established that London has dropped to fifteenth place with regard to investment prospects and thirteenth place in terms of development prospects. In the past, London has been branded ‘a long-term favourite’. According to a spokesperson for the organisation, it is a measure of the sentiment of investors and developers which reflects that London, relative to other markets in Europe, has become exceptionally expensive.
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Need for a real estate authors from London
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Hi, its Tam Tree, hope you like the London real estate news blog. I need real estate authors from London to help me coverage the London area. Please send email if you like to participated in this effort. Thanks ! tamtree@gmail.com
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Bear buy fuels London real estate fears
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LONDON (Reuters) - JP Morgan's (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) cut-price takeover of rival Bear Stearns (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) has thrown open the U.S. bank's London office requirements at a time when tenant demand in Europe's premier financial centre appears vulnerable. "It's the question we're all asking ourselves," said one leading London property broker, on condition of anonymity. "Do they (JP Morgan) need a bigger headquarters or a smaller one?" he said.
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