Grosvenor Looking to Sell Nearly $1B in Direct Holdings

The Duke of Westminster is pulling a Brexit out of the United States.

Grosvenor Group Holdings, owned by billionaire duke Hugh Grosvenor, is planning to sell its direct real estate holdings in the U.S., Bloomberg reported. The holdings up for sale are valued at £700 million ($954 million USD) combined.

The portfolio is not going to be sold as a one-shot deal, instead broken off piece by piece. The disposition is expected to take place “over a period of time,” according to company executive James Raynor.

On the company’s website, Grosvenor describes the U.S. portfolio as assets “in well-connected locations that benefit from strong demographic and economic fundamentals.” The portfolio shown on the website includes five properties in Los Angeles and San Francisco, five properties in Washington, D.C. and a pair of properties in Seattle.

The selloff has already begun. This week, the New York-based arm of Swiss insurer Zurich acquired a 54,700-square-foot property at 394 Pacific Avenue in San Francisco from Grosvenor Americas for $32.8 million. The price penciled out to roughly $600 per square foot.

Grosvenor paid $32.3 million for the building in 2016. The investor has been offloading San Francisco assets as it shifts toward deploying capital through joint ventures rather than direct ownership, a company spokesperson said.

Last year, the company lost £108 million in North America because of flailing valuations, including the reevaluation of a pair of development sites in Vancouver. That stood in stark contrast to the £88.8 million profit generated by the company’s portfolio in the United Kingdom.

It lost £23.2 million in revenue across the world for the year.

Grosvenor, which goes back to the 17th century, counts £9.5 billion of assets under management across 48 cities around the world. Its 35-year-old leader sports a net worth of approximately $12.7 billion.

— Holden Walter-Warner