Two bidders are left in the hunt for NatWest Bank's One Hardman Boulevard in Manchester, which the bank is vacating and that has a potential end value in excess of £200 million.
Cushman & Wakefield is advising NatWest on the sale of the 368,000-square-foot building which is in the city’s Spinningfields business district.
NatWest, a long-term tenant of the building, paid £292 million to buy it from the Pension Protection Fund in December 2021 but staff have been vacating it as the bank focuses on more hybrid working. When it bought the asset bank had a lease of 16 years remaining, with exiting the office a major driver of the acquisition.
CoStar News understands there has been strong bidding for the asset, which represents a major prime regional repositioning opportunity, and two parties have been selected for the final round of bidding.
They are US private equity giant Apollo Global Management in partnership with UK investor and developer Allied London, the original developer of Spinningfields, and US real estate group Lincoln Property Group, which is best known in the UK for the Station Hill development around Reading Station.
Other interested bidders are understood to have included Orion Capital Partners.
It is thought that a price of around £45 million would be paid for a building that, when repositioned and occupied, could have an end value of significantly in excess of £200 million.
NatWest, as successor to the Royal Bank of Scotland, has occupied a majority of the property since it delivered in 2004. At the time it bought the building in December 2021, the passing rent was £12,980,280.86 a year, let at £40 per square feet.
Manchester, as with other key UK office markets, has seen subdued investment activity this year and progress on the sale will be a welcome boost. Today a separate bellwether sale, this time for an income producing core asset, One Angel Square has launched, with CBRE marketing the Co-operative Group's building at the Noma estate seeking £165 million.