Feldberg Capital has acquired 8 Bloomsbury Street, an office building in London WC1 for its new brown to green workplace fund, ReForm, from an undisclosed institutional investor.
The ReForm Fund will transition brown office to green workplace and targets amenity-rich central London growth locations with excellent connectivity, such as Soho, Fitzrovia, Marylebone and Bloomsbury.
The Fund has received significant backing from a cornerstone UK institutional investor, achieving first close in October of this year. The Fund has a fundraising target of £300 million, which will provide firepower of around £500 million including leverage.
8 Bloomsbury Street, which was refurbished by architects Buckley Gray Yeoman in 2017, will receive further retrofit using Feldberg’s market-leading ESG expertise to provide tenants with bespoke, fully-fitted, best-in-class green workplace across 33,448 sq ft.
The building is well located being close to the dynamic mix of retail, restaurants, bars and theatres of Fitzrovia, Soho and Covent Garden. It is a three-minute walk from Tottenham Court Road Station, which has been bolstered as an office location with the opening of the Elizabeth line.
The office sector is undergoing a significant structural shift with a growing division between healthy, tech-enabled, green workplace assets and older, less energy-efficient offices. This, in addition to the challenging macro-economic climate, has created an attractive buying opportunity for Feldberg to apply its brown-to-green asset management expertise, and deliver stock into a market experiencing a scarcity of green ESG-focused workplace assets but growing occupier demand.
Robert Allen-Mersh, Director at Feldberg Capital, said: “We are seeing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in some of Central London’s best commercial real estate assets at very attractive values. This transaction demonstrates our ability to source opportunities of the highest quality in a tough market. 8 Bloomsbury Street is a high-quality building in an excellent location a short walk from Tottenham Court Road Station, but requires significant ESG improvement works to create a best-in-class green workplace asset. This is an excellent first acquisition for the Fund as we look to assemble a unique Central London portfolio with an attractive pipeline.”
David Turner, Managing Partner at Feldberg Capital, said: ‘The London office market provides one of the most attractive risk adjusted investment opportunities in Europe. Rarely does such value exist in a global gateway city, but the window may close quickly as interest rates fall.’
The ReForm Fund is one of the first UK funds to link a proportion of the manager’s performance fees to pre-determined ESG targets, creating significant alignment between investors’ ESG ambitions and financial returns.
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