Less than six weeks after snapping up Manhattan’s MetLife Building (200 Park Avenue) for a whopping $1.72 billion, Tishman Speyer Properties is at it again. This time, however, the Manhattan-based real estate investment firm has paid roughly $400 million to buy Goldman Sachs’ London headquarters building.
Goldman Sachs, a Manhattan-based investment bank, will continue to occupy the entire 133-140 Fleet Street property for another 15 years under their lease. The 370,000 sq. ft. office property was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and completed in 1991, and Goldman Sachs’ European headquarters offices have been located there since then.
With this acquisition, Tishman Speyer will now own 8 office properties through various funds in London. Tishman Speyer bought the Fleet Street property through its European Strategic Office Fund (ESOF), a closed-end fund that was started in August 2003 with roughly €450 million in equity commitments.
ESOF is structured as a core-plus European fund that strictly buys assets located in major Western European Central Business Districts (among them Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Milan, and Paris.) According to Tishman Speyer, assets will have minimal short-term leasing risk, no land or development risk and provide stable, current cash distributions based on lower risk-adjusted returns. As of last summer, the ESOF had acquired two properties, which makes this latest deal in the Fund’s third acquisition.