The owners of luxury hotel firm The Grange have struck a deal to sell the company’s four prize London assets for close to £1bn.
Queensgate Investments has entered exclusive talks to buy the hotels, which have a total of 1,317 bedrooms.
The sale has also attracted interest from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Starwood Capital Group, CBRE Global Investors and Aprirose.
The portfolio is made up of the 433-bedroom Grange St Paul’s, EC4; the 370-bedroom Grange Tower Bridge, E1; the 307-bedroom Grange City Hotel on Cooper’s Row, EC3 (pictured left); and the 207-bedroom Grange Holborn, WC1 (pictured right).
Grange is owned by founding partners the Matharu brothers and is one of London’s largest privately held hotel companies. The company also owns a further 12 hotels in London and one in Berkshire. These properties are not included in the sale.
The Matharu brothers – Harpal, Raj and Tony – are all approaching retirement age. A sale of the four hotels could allow one or more of the brothers to exit the business.
The deal with Queensgate marks a crucial step forward in what has been a lengthy sale process. US real estate services provider HFF formally kicked off a sales process for some or all of Grange’s £1.3bn empire in March 2017 but investors have been circling the hotels since 2016, when Leon Partners, which was bought by HFF last year, began working on the prospective deal.
Queensgate, headed by chief executive Jason Kow, is a partnership between Peterson Group, LJ Partnership and the Kow family.
It has been looking to expand its UK hotels presence over the past year and was an underbidder on Lone Star’s £800m Jurys Inn portfolio, which was ultimately sold to Pandox last year.
The company is in the process of working up major redevelopment plans for the Kensington Forum Hotel, SW7, which it bought from Apollo Global Management in 2015 for around £400m. It is aiming to build a new 749-bedroom hotel, 340 serviced apartments and 46 flats.
Last year it also bought upmarket hostels business Generator from Patron Capital for €450m (£400m).
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