Bruntwood SciTech, a joint venture between Bruntwood and Legal & General, has acquired Glasgow’s Met Tower from Osborne+Co for £16.2m, marking its first investment in Scotland.
The 14-storey office building in the heart of the city centre and innovation district – that’s been vacant since 2014 – is set to become a new hub for tech and digital businesses.
The company unveiled a £30m transformation programme for the building.
”Its plans for the Grade B listed, old City of Glasgow College building, will transform it into a hub where university spinouts, startups, scaleups, and large leading tech businesses can co-locate together and benefit from being in an innovative, collaborative tech cluster,” said the company in a statement.
It is intended that Met Tower be net zero in operation following a transformation project that will retain as much of its existing fabric as possible, significantly reducing the embedded carbon impact of the re-development.
Offering 113,000 sq ft of coworking, serviced and leased office space, Bruntwood SciTech will also be creating a shared breakout space on the ground floor, showers, lockers, secure cycle store and sports kit drying room, as well as a rooftop lounge to be used by its future community. It will also offer a cafe and other food & beverage amenities.
Work is expected to start later this year, subject to planning, and complete in 2024.
Kate Lawlor, chief executive of Bruntwood SciTech, said: “Glasgow has one of Europe’s most exciting, diverse tech and digital clusters with exceptional higher education institutions and clinical assets. Met Tower is in a brilliant location for these types of businesses and is perfectly placed to help create a hub in which they can scale, co-innovate and thrive.
“Glasgow’s science and tech sector is rapidly growing, having seen some of the highest growth in the whole of the UK in the past two years, and now makes up 28% of all jobs in the city. As a result it has retained its position in the top three leading tech cities in the UK outside of London. Our investment in Glasgow is for the long term, and as we’ve demonstrated in our other cities, we are committed to becoming embedded and driving forwards the growth of the knowledge economy and economic impact of the sector both in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. This is our first in hopefully several brilliant projects in the country.”
OakNorth Bank has supported Bruntwood SciTech with the acquisition of Met Tower through the provision of an £8.6m acquisition loan and an agreement to provide up to £27m of additional funding to support the subsequent redevelopment of the building
