The 706-room hotel was bought by CDL’s wholly-owned subsidiary Copthorne Hotel Holdings, with the price working out to £396,600 per room, the Singapore-based developer said in a statement on Tuesday.
The freehold building spans 6,356 square meters and is just a two-minute walk from Kensington High Street, which is close to several cultural landmarks like Hyde Park, Kensington Palace and the Royal Albert Hall. It is also a 15-minute walk from the Olympia London exhibition center, CDL noted.
Its occupancy rate exceeded 97% in the nine months leading up to this September while total revenues over the past 12 months surpassed £39 million. The firm expects the property to deliver a running yield of more than 6%.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure an ultra-prime freehold site in Central London. Freehold sites in this location are exceptionally scarce, and it is even rarer to find one directly adjacent to our Copthorne Tara hotel,” Kwek, who is CDL’s executive chairman, said in the statement.
With the purchase, the firm’s hotel portfolio in Central London now boasts more than 3,000 rooms, spanning properties such as The Biltmore Mayfair, Millennium Gloucester Hotel London and the Copthorne Tara Hotel London Kensington.
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The Holiday Inn London – Kensington High Street hotel. Photo from City Developments Limited’s website |
The latest transaction comes as CDL has been divesting from assets to shore up its finances and optimize its portfolio. So far this year, it has raised S$1.9 billion (US$1.46 billion) from divestments.
Last month, it sold a 250-unit multifamily property in Sunnyvale, California, for US$143.5 million and agreed to divest the Bespoke Hotel Osaka Shinsaibashi in Japan to Blackstone-managed real estate funds for 14 billion yen (US$89.9 million), as reported by Singapore Business Review.
It also said that same month that it was in advanced talks with selected bidders for Quayside Isle, the only mall at the exclusive Sentosa Cove enclave in Singapore, which it had earlier put on the market with an asking price of S$111 million, according to The Business Times.
Kwek and his family were ranked second on Forbes’ list of Singapore’s 50 richest, released in early September, with an estimated net worth of US$14.3 billion.
