Hammerson selling Silverburn Glasgow mall share for discount £140m

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Dec 15, 2021

Under the heading ‘disposal of non-core assets’, UK commercial property giant Hammerson said Wednesday it has sold its share in Silverburn, the 100,000 sq m shopping centre near Glasgow.

The firm’s 50/50 joint venture was sold for £140 million cash, a 4% discount to its 30 June book value of £147m. The new owners are Henderson Park and Eurofund and Hammerson said the sale was in line with its strategy of “reducing debt, simplifying the portfolio and generating capital for redeployment”.

Five other non retail assets were also sold for a combined £22 million.

The owner/operator of the Bullring & Grand Central malls in Birmingham and the Bicester Village Designer Outlet Centre in Oxfordshire, has been disposing of its non-core businesses, which included retail parks, over the past year.

“Together with minority stake disposals of French and UK assets (£73 million) and the UK Retail Parks portfolio (£330 million) sold in the first half of the year, the transactions announced today take Hammerson's total gross proceeds from sales in 2021 to £495m”, it said.

The need to offload those non-core assets continues as Hammerson, along with its property peers, battles to regain ground lost as the pandemic lockdowns severely hit operations, The company has so far written down the value of its portfolio by £5.5 billion.

In October, it said some retail tenants were still in arrears despite having seen a “significant” improvement in collection rates, with the business remaining “focused on collecting arrears”.

However, with further retail lockdowns a possibility due to the spread of the Omicron Covid variant, there could well be more pain ahead for the wider commercial property market in 2022.