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Canary Wharf Group in Talks to Buy CapCo’s Earls Court

Canary Wharf Group in Talks to Buy CapCo’s Earls Court

(Bloomberg) -- Capital & Counties Properties Plc is in preliminary talks to sell most of its Earls Court development in west London to Canary Wharf Group, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The talks with Canary Wharf Group, which is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority and Brookfield Asset Management Inc., are at an early stage and may not result in a deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a private negotiation. Other suitors for the project could still emerge, they added. Capital & Counties has been considering splitting out the project into a separate company or selling the land -- one of the largest development sites in London -- for more than a year, and has been approached by a number of potential buyers.

Representatives for Canary Wharf Group and Capital & Counties declined to comment.

The shares rose as much as 7.4% in London trading, the biggest increase since November 2016. They were up 5.1% at 220.1 pence as of 12:27 p.m.

Earls Court is an emblem of the downturn in London’s luxury housing market, which has been battered by tax hikes and uncertainty surrounding Britain’s departure from the European Union. Capital & Counties slashed the value of the project, which has approvals for about 7,500 homes, to 658 million pounds ($825 million) in February, the latest in a series of writedowns resulting from falling prices and developers’ heightened caution in taking on large projects. Its value has since slipped even more.

The development project has faced fierce local political opposition, with Hammersmith and Fulham threatening to force the company to sell some of the land back to the borough. Capital & Counties Chief Executive Ian Hawksworth waved off concerns about the threat in a newspaper interview in May.

Capital & Counties has spent more than a decade obtaining planning permission, cleaning the soil and demolishing existing buildings at Earls Court and large parts of the site are ready for development. The holdings are divided into multiple parcels of land that the company owns together with various venture partners. Construction of about 800 homes is under way at Lillie Square, a part of the site owned jointly by Hong Kong’s Kwok family.

Canary Wharf Group is best known for the glass and steel towers that it built in east London’s disused docks in the 1990s and 2000s and leased to banks including HSBC Holdings Plc, Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. It has since diversified, and is currently developing thousands of homes for sale and rent on the capital’s south bank and in a new district next to the original Canary Wharf estate.

A sale would allow Capital & Counties to focus on its larger Covent Garden estate of upmarket stores and restaurants that form one of London’s top tourist destinations. Investor concerns about falling demand for luxury homes has weighed on the company’s shares, which trade at a steep discount to its underlying assets.

Madison International Realty, which last month disclosed that it holds a 3.12% stake in Capital & Counties, has called the company “materially undervalued.” Ronald Dickerman, founder and president of the New York based private equity firm, described Earls Court as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to redevelop a piece of prime London real estate.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Jack Sidders in London at jsidders@bloomberg.net;Dinesh Nair in London at dnair5@bloomberg.net;Scott Deveau in New York at sdeveau2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Shelley Robinson at ssmith118@bloomberg.net, Patrick Henry

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