Chinese buyer Ginkgo Capital Management has scooped Drapers Gardens in the City of London from Evans Randall.
It will pay around £285m (€356.8m) – a record 4.5% yield for this cycle – for the prime 27,173 m2 office block.
The property had been under offer to Mort Zuckerman’s Boston Properties. Had that deal completed, it would have been the first buy in the City for Zuckerman, the billionaire owner of the New York Daily News. But the deal collapsed earlier this month.
Ginkgo is associated with the $200bn China Investment Corporation.
Evans Randall bought Drapers Gardens in November 2010 from a joint venture between Canary Wharf Group and Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds for £242.5m – a 5.2% yield.
Drapers Gardens has been the subject of intense speculation in recent months with a number of investors being linked with a potential purchase. South Korean pension fund Samsung Life and Kuwaiti property company St Martins Corporation both considered buying it, but neither made a formal bid.
Jones Lang LaSalle director James Beckham said: “There are a very few opportunities in the market where you can buy such long-dated income attached to best-in-class buildings. This is clearly one of them.”
CBRE advised Evans Randall.
