A member of the P V Doyle family and her husband are selling a London investment, writes JACK FAGAN
SLIGO-BASED Ray and Eileen Monaghan are the latest Irish investors planning to cash in on the resurgent London commercial property market by selling a building at 160 New Bond Street, London W1, which is leased to LVMH group company Louis Vuitton.
A price of over £40 million (€47.3m) is being sought for the high profile investment which was bought two years ago for around £28.5 million (€34.1m). Ms Monaghan is one of three daughters of the late PV Doyle, founder of the hotel empire. The women’s company, JDH, sold the Jurys Inn chain to Quinlan Private in 2007 for €1.165 billion.
Previously they realised another €707 million from the sale of hotels such as Jurys Ballsbridge, the Berkeley Court, the Burlington, the Towers and the Montrose.
Ray and Eileen Monaghan also paid £70 million in 2007 for a substantial office block at 16 Old Bailey in the City of London. More recently, they developed a new shopping street, Johnston Court, in Sligo.
Apart from benefitting from capital growth on New Bond Street over the past two years, the couple stand to do well out of the favourable exchange rate should they decide to reinvest the proceeds of the New Bond Street investment in the euro zone.
The move to sell what is known as Churchill House on New Bond Street may have been prompted by last week’s opening of a new European flagship store by Louis Vuitton on the opposite side of New Bond Street. It is the second biggest after the Paris store.
The retail space at ground and lower ground level is to be occupied by another company in the LVMH group. The lease runs to 2024 and includes a break option in 2019. There are three floors of self-contained offices, two apartments and two car-parking spaces on a lower ground floor.
Churchill House is producing a rent of £1,551,500 (€1,835,000) and, based on a selling price of over £40 million, it will show a net initial yield of 3.81 per cent with a reversion to 4.35 per cent. The retail rent equates to a Zone A rate of £770 per sq ft (€911 per sq ft).
Selling agents Fineman Ross say that while many markets across the UK have witnessed a steep outward shift in investment yields, the West End of London has remained relatively robust.
Investor demand in London has been driven by overseas buyers, attracted by the fall in property values. These buyers have now been joined by institutional investors. The agents say that Mayfair assets are highly sought after with their offer of prime real estate in a global market. Separately, the Cosgrave Group expects to secure at least €230 million in the coming months from the sale of a block of shops and offices on Oxford Street.
