Sager Group, a London developer cofounded by the UAE’s Sheikh Sagir bin Mohammed, has unveiled plans to transform London’s Royal Mail headquarters into a £400 million (Dh2.21 billion) mixed-use project known as Islington Square.
The 500,000 square feet site in Islington will be opened up with a new public boulevard created.
The redeveloped site will be made up of four buildings containing serviced apartments, retail, leisure and residential space.
One of the buildings, 8 Esther Anne Place, involves the restoration of an Edwardian building and at 17 Esther Anne Place the Edwardian facade will be retained, but a new basement and upper floors added.
A new building will be put in place at 11 Esther Anne Place and the former Mitre public house is being converted into apartments. In total, the project, which is being developed with the US firm Cain Hoy, will contain 263 private and affordable homes.
These will be one, two and three-bed properties ranging in price from £715,000 to £1.79m.
Sager Group bought Royal Mail’s former north London Sorting Centre site in 2003 for about £30m, but has since been piecing together other assets to assemble the site.
One of the final pieces of the jigsaw was put in place last year with the purchase of a site at Eagle Wharf Road, which has become Royal Mail’s new sorting centre.
Royal Mail had been operating at the site in Islington since 1904, and in its heyday there were more than 3,000 postal workers on the site as well as a refreshment club.
However, as more modern handling techniques have been incorporated, space requirements for handling post have shrunk.
Royal Mail vacated the site in September to allow for its redevelopment to begin.
The project is understood to be the biggest conversion of an Edwardian warehouse since the creation of Harrods Village at Barnes in south-west London in the 1990s.
“Islington Square is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a new destination for London,” said Giris Rabinovitch, the chief executive of Sager Group.
“It sits in the heart of Islington, which is steeped in history and culture.” The sorting office is just one of a number of historic London sites that have been bought for redevelopment by UAE investors. Lulu Group bought Great Scotland Yard, which was the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police between 1829 and 1890, for £110m in July with a view to turning it into a boutique hotel.
Abu Dhabi Financial Group (ADFG) paid £370m for the Metropolitan Police’s current headquarters, New Scotland Yard, in December last year and its London development company, Northacre, is awaiting approval for its plans to redevelop the site.
Northacre is also handling ADFG’s transformation of the Grade II-listed former Palace Hotel, built in 1861, into One Palace Street – a collection of 71 super-prime apartments overlooking Buckingham Palace.
Speaking in Dubai last week, Niccolò Barattieri di San Pietro, the chief executive of Northacre, quoted an Arcadis report which said that London is set for £620bn of investment in infrastructure, commercial and residential property over the next 15 years.
“What London does incredibly well is marrying the old and the new, creating an incredibly vibrant place for people to live in,” he said.
mfahy@thenational.ae
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How Tesla’s price correction has hit fund managers
Investing in disruptive technology can be a bumpy ride, as investors in Tesla were reminded on Friday, when its stock dropped 7.5 per cent in early trading to $575.
It recovered slightly but still ended the week 15 per cent lower and is down a third from its all-time high of $883 on January 26. The electric car maker’s market cap fell from $834 billion to about $567bn in that time, a drop of an astonishing $267bn, and a blow for those who bought Tesla stock late.
The collapse also hit fund managers that have gone big on Tesla, notably the UK-based Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF.
Tesla is the top holding in both funds, making up a hefty 10 per cent of total assets under management. Both funds have fallen by a quarter in the past month.
Matt Weller, global head of market research at GAIN Capital, recently warned that Tesla founder Elon Musk had “flown a bit too close to the sun”, after getting carried away by investing $1.5bn of the company’s money in Bitcoin.
He also predicted Tesla’s sales could struggle as traditional auto manufacturers ramp up electric car production, destroying its first mover advantage.
AJ Bell’s Russ Mould warns that many investors buy tech stocks when earnings forecasts are rising, almost regardless of valuation. “When it works, it really works. But when it goes wrong, elevated valuations leave little or no downside protection.”
A Tesla correction was probably baked in after last year’s astonishing share price surge, and many investors will see this as an opportunity to load up at a reduced price.
Dramatic swings are to be expected when investing in disruptive technology, as Ms Wood at ARK makes clear.
Every week, she sends subscribers a commentary listing “stocks in our strategies that have appreciated or dropped more than 15 per cent in a day” during the week.
Her latest commentary, issued on Friday, showed seven stocks displaying extreme volatility, led by ExOne, a leader in binder jetting 3D printing technology. It jumped 24 per cent, boosted by news that fellow 3D printing specialist Stratasys had beaten fourth-quarter revenues and earnings expectations, seen as good news for the sector.
By contrast, computational drug and material discovery company Schrödinger fell 27 per cent after quarterly and full-year results showed its core software sales and drug development pipeline slowing.
Despite that setback, Ms Wood remains positive, arguing that its “medicinal chemistry platform offers a powerful and unique view into chemical space”.
In her weekly video view, she remains bullish, stating that: “We are on the right side of change, and disruptive innovation is going to deliver exponential growth trajectories for many of our companies, in fact, most of them.”
Ms Wood remains committed to Tesla as she expects global electric car sales to compound at an average annual rate of 82 per cent for the next five years.
She said these are so “enormous that some people find them unbelievable”, and argues that this scepticism, especially among institutional investors, “festers” and creates a great opportunity for ARK.
Only you can decide whether you are a believer or a festering sceptic. If it’s the former, then buckle up.
