The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) has confirmed it is taking control of two Liverpool commercial schemes. Both sites are now expected to be put up for sale.
The agency stepped in when a 10-year joint venture agreement on both the Exchange Station office complex and Liverpool Innovation Park came to an end. The NorwePP partnership was formed in 2006 by the now defunct Northwest Development Agency and the Ashtenne Industrial Fund to finance almost two dozen Merseyside projects. Aviva Investors now controls the Ashtenne portfolio.
When the Government axed the regional development agencies in September 2011, the NWDA’s interest in the joint venture was taken up by the HCA. Now Aviva’s asset managers and the agency have mutually agreed to wind up the joint venture 18 months early.
The partnership was originally set up to regenerate, manage, and sell on the majority of the former Northwest Development Agency’s industrial and office assets. Twenty of those industrial and commercial assets were sold in a single portfolio last November, with only the Exchange Station and Innovation Park remaining. Both properties are managed by the real estate services agency CBRE.
“The partnership did a tremendous job in improving its property assets and moving them into private ownership, especially when it mostly operated during a period of dramatic falls in property values and rents and economic uncertainty,” explained Deborah McLaughlin, the HCA’s north west executive director.
“The two remaining properties in the portfolio have transferred to the HCA and we will manage and improve them with a view to selling them to the private sector when we consider this in the best interests of tenants and the city.”
Set in the heart of Liverpool’s central business district, the Exchange Station was, for 150 years, one of the largest and busiest mainline railway stations in the region until its closure in 1977. Eight years later the building was converted into an office complex and renamed Mercury Court. After years of neglect, more than £5m was last year spent on completing the 193,000sq ft of office space and converting the 5,500sq ft entrance hall into a communal area for tenants.
Work on the Tithebarn Street building was carried out by Space Northwest whose director, Wayne Locke, explained: “The completion of the concourse marks a huge milestone in the redevelopment of Exchange Station and represents a fantastic communal area for people to get together and talk business, which is very rare in office developments in Liverpool city centre.”
First opened in 1983 as Wavertree Technology Park — and with Sony and Barclays Bank as its inaugural tenants — Liverpool Innovation Park is Merseyside’s biggest high-tech business hub. It is fully occupied by a cross section of major companies such as Nutricia, part of the French-owned Danone group, and small to medium-sized knowledge-intensive firms specialising in mobile communications, medical devices, finance, and pharmaceutical distribution. The site also has a number of restaurants, cafes and retail units.
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