Over €300 million of Madrid offices hit the market this week

Blackstone and GMP have announced their respective plans to sell two Madrid office assets this week.

GMP’s latest move is aligned with their strategy of focusing on core locations in the city’s central business district and follows their sale of Barajas 1 to Angelo Gordon and the sale of Llano Castellano 51 to Azora. The Spanish REIT has now hired CBRE to divest their Castellana Norte business park which is located in Las Tablas, a densely populated residential & office neighbourhood north of the CBD which was developed during the early 2000s. The main tenants of the property are Banco Sabadell and Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, whose shares have been hit by recent China-US tensions.

Madrid’s Las Tablas neighbourhood is located west of the A-1 highway and bordered on the southeast by Sanchinarro and on the west by Montecarmelo, Tres Olivos and the Fuencarral district. Towards the north, it connects with Madrid’s wealthy northern neighbourhoods of La Moraleja and El Encinar de los Reyes.

Over the last decade, Las Tablas has become a major location for offices and is home to several corporate headquarters including the Telefónica campus, where over 15,000 employees work. In addition, other occupiers include Dragados, FCC, CASER Insurance, BMW, Renault, Peugeot, Hyundai, Capgemini and Mediaset. In 2015, BBVA bank opened La Vela, its 114,000m² financial city which houses over 7000 employees and was designed by Herzog & de Meuron. According to Juan-Luis Martínez Quevedo, CEO of property consultants Astorga Real Estate Partners, this property could sell at a net initial yield of between 5% and 5.5%.

Blackstone, on the other hand, continues to sell non-strategic properties from the Hispania portfolio they bought last July. The plot of land is in the Campo de las Naciones neighbourhood on Vía de los Poblados Poblados nº1 and was one of the first large office developments started after the great recession. Hispania paid 32 million euros for the plot and Blackstone is currently developing two six-storey buildings with combined GLA of ​​35,000m². The new building will be known as the Helios building and it is now up for grabs following the recent pre-lease agreement the vendor has signed with Dutch multinational banking group, ING. Works are expected to finish in 2020 which is when ING will re-locate to this location vacating its current offices in Las Rozas. Market sources expect Blackstone to receive over €170 million for the forward-sale.