Savills Investment Management Pays $210M for Belgium Asset

Brussels skyline. Image by LVER via Pixabay.com

Savills Investment Management has acquired an office building near Brussels’ central business district in a sale-leaseback deal. Savills acquired the property on behalf of a foreign investor from AXA and the current tenant of the building, Euroclear, for approximately 173 million euros ($210.4 million).

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Located at 1 Blvd. du Roi-Albert II, the office building was developed in the 1990s and renovated between 2017 and 2018. The 36,000-square-meter (387,500-square-foot) property is fully leased to Belgium-based financial services company Euroclear, which signed a 12-year lease for the space, according to Savills.

The property is situated just outside Brussels North and the city’s central business district, and within walking distance to Rogier Station, a nearby transit hub. Savills noted that the attractive submarket that its latest investment is located in is also home to several international headquarters and other high-rise office buildings.

Savills was advised by PwC and Treex, while the seller was advised by Loyens & Loeff and JLL.

Brussels’ appeal to investors

Pierre Escande, Savills Investment Management’s head of investment for France and BeLux, said in prepared remarks that Belgium, and specifically Brussels, is still at the heart of its 2021 investment strategy. Elsewhere in Europe, Savills also teamed up with Kajima Properties Europe in August 2020 to launch a partnership whose first acquisition was a 1.6 million-square-foot logistics park in Poland.

According to Savills, the Brussels office market is attractive to European institutions and government organizations looking for long leases. The region continues to attract investors and saw its largest single-asset transaction ever in January 2020, when The Brussels Finance Tower sold for a record 1.2 billion euros (approximately $1.3 billion).