Hines in Line to Buy London Office for $249M

After an absent couple of years in London, Hines is crashing the party with one of the biggest office deals of the year.

Hines agreed to buy the Worship Square office building at 65 Clifton Street for approximately $248.7 million, Bisnow reported. The deal for the 140,000-square-foot property breaks down to more than $1,775 per square foot.

The seller in the transaction, first reported by Green Street News, is HB Reavis. The European developer was originally seeking a sale price of around $260 million when it put the property on the market in March, according to Bloomberg.

CBRE advised HB Reavis, which plans to use sale proceeds for its development pipeline.

Tenants at the building include fintech firm Wise and consultancy Frontier Economics. The property is already fully leased, despite only being completed slightly more than a year ago.

The deal represents Hines’ first office acquisition in London in two years. It also comes as the developer is seeking to sell The Burlian, a landmarked retail and office development on Oxford Street and Bond Street; Hines is in negotiations to sell that property for roughly $269 million, according to CoStar.

The London office investment market has been picking up steam as buyers acquire assets primed for rental growth. In the last six months, Australian pension fund Aware Super and Delancey purchased three London office buildings for a combined total of more than $605 million.

In 2022, Google agreed to spend $1 billion to buy Central Saint Giles, a London office property near the British Museum, which it was already using.

As for Hines, its nontraded real estate investment trust, Hines Global Income Trust, recently paid $137.6 million for Montrose Collective, a 189,000-square-foot mixed-use project in Houston. The acquisition set a new price-per-foot record for the city.

— Holden Walter-Warner