The Earls Court Development Co. unveiled plans to “bring back the wonder” to one of London’s most famous, and most famously derelict, sites with plans for more than 7 million square feet of boundary-pushing sustainable development.
Home for more than a century to the capital’s key international exhibition and events venue, the property has been flattened but left vacant for eight years. An increasingly fraught breakdown in relations among local residents, politicians and landowners stalled progress on central London’s biggest cleared development plot.
Hotel giant Accor has development projects in the works worldwide, with properties in the Middle East and Southeast Asia performing particularly well for the Paris-based company amid an upturn in international travel.
Agnès Roquefort, Accor’s chief development officer for luxury and lifestyle properties, said the company’s Middle East development includes a particular focus on Saudi Arabia, with Egypt also performing strongly thanks to leisure and business demand. Accor also saw strong development activity in Southeast Asia during 2022, and the trend is expected to continue in 2023.
Executives of Gecina said the Paris-based real estate investment trust is “on the attack” after a series of lease signings with premium rents in the city’s central business district.
Gecina CEO Beñat Ortega said lease price increases in that neighborhood during the past fiscal year amounted to a year-over-year increase of €50 per square meter happening “almost every six months.” With new signings by financial service and luxury retail tenants among others, the company said it has reached annual rent levels “close to the new premium” at about €1,000 per square meter.
Retail landlords in Germany are increasingly insisting that inflation-linked rent increases be implemented without concessions, despite high inflation rates.
A survey by researchers at the EHI Institute, querying 82 retailers with a combined total of more than 30,000 stores in Germany, found 79% said indexed increases are always or often fully realized. Indexed increases are scheduled for 2022 and 2023 by more than 50% of the store operators surveyed, and only 5% said they would face index increases in less than 25% of their leased stores in both 2022 and 2023.
One of Canada’s largest real estate investment trust deals on record has officially closed, as Dream Industrial REIT and Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC have finalized their $5.9 billion acquisition of Summit Industrial Income REIT.
The deal, in the works since early November, required final approval from the federal government under the Investment Canada Act, which reviews foreign acquisitions of Canadian businesses. Dream’s acquisition roughly doubles its size in Canada and is the largest such transaction in the country since a consortium led by Montreal-based Canderel Real Estate Property Inc. paid $5.7 billion for Quebec City-based Cominar REIT in October 2021.
In a deal billed as the largest economic investment in Utah history, global chipmaker Texas Instruments plans to invest $11 billion to expand its 300-millimeter semiconductor fabrication plant in Utah with a secondary manufacturing facility.
The plan is part of a larger expansion that also includes a previously announced $30 billion chipmaking campus in Texas. The Dallas-based company told investors it plans to double its annual spending on chipmaking plants through 2025 to help supply its customers in decades to come.
This report was compiled from CoStar’s international news publications in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany.
