Royal Bank of Scotland has decided to go ahead with plans to outsource a swathe of its 3,000 properties.
A team headed by Martin Nicholls, head of strategy and asset management at RBS, is aiming to send out a memorandum to potential bidders detailing the proposed structure of the deal by Christmas. Bids could then be invited in the next three to four months, for what could be the UK’s second-biggest corporate outsourcing after the British Telecom deal.
RBS has sounded out potential purchasers including Land Securities Trillium and Mapeley, London & Cambridge Properties — which bought Bradford & Bingley’s surplus property — the Livingstone brothers’ London & Regional and Oxiana, the new company set up by former MEPC directors Jamie Dundas and Robert Ware.
A source said: “This would be a major fillip to the outsourcing market. We need another deal.”
RBS’s operational property — including high-street NatWest and RBS branches, as well as offices — will be outsourced and the bank will also dispose of assets that have become surplus since it took over NatWest in 2000.
Ernst & Young was appointed in the summer to develop a structure for the RBS deal. Nelson Bakewell and GVA Grimley, which won two-year contracts to manage the bank’s UK portfolio last year, will also be involved.
● David Cockerton, head of asset management and corporate property, has left RBS.
