Low-profile investment firm Englander Group has put a £110m slice of Kensington High Street, W8, up for sale.
The sale would be the first major disposal for Eliasz Englander’s private investment company since 2005, when it sold the Kensington HQ of music giant EMI for £40m.
DTZ has been instructed to find a buyer for the group’s 180,000 sq ft Kensington Arcade. The asking price of £110m, for both the freehold and leasehold interests, reflects a 6% yield.
Englander, who was ranked 108th in EG‘s 2009 Rich List with a £160m fortune, bought the office and retail block above Kensington Tube station from Nick Leslau and Sir Tom Hunter for £120m, a 6.5% yield, in 2003.
The septuagenarian investor joins a growing list of vendors hoping to benefit from the strong appetite for central London retail assets.
Kensington Arcade is the fourth shopping centre at a London Underground station to be put up for sale in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, Belfast-based William Ewart instructed Franc Warwick to sell a £300m portfolio of shopping centres at Tube stations in Victoria, Fulham and Hammersmith.
The Kensington Arcade is one Englander’s largest West End assets. However, the company’s flagship scheme is its Holborn Links estate on Southampton Row, WC1.
The 100,000 sq ft office and retail scheme is almost fully let to tenants including Nando’s, Eat, Prêt a Manger, and Metro Bank, the first new UK bank to be authorised by the Financial Services Authority in more than 150 years.
