Zuckerman Says Boston Properties ‘Interested’ in London
Boston Properties Inc. (BXP), after trying unsuccessfully to buy a London building, continues to want real estate in the city, Chairman Mort Zuckerman said.
“We’re still interested in the London market but we’re much more concentrated, as always, here in the United States, in a very, very select group of markets, which are doing well,” Zuckerman said today on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Markers” with Stephanie Ruhle and Erik Schatzker.
The Boston-based company, which is the largest U.S. office real estate investment trust by stock-market value, has looked at buildings in London without completing a purchase, President Doug Linde said in a May 2 earnings conference call. It had been in talks with private-equity firm Evans Randall to buy the 292,500-square-foot (27,174-square-meter) Drapers Gardens for about $450 million, Dow Jones Newswires reported on May 15, citing a person familiar with the matter who it didn’t name.
Zuckerman said today that a recent deal in London fell apart because of “a technical issue.”
“We had actually signed an agreement to buy a particular property, but when we got to the closing it turned out the owner didn’t own the property -- or it didn’t own a 100 percent of the property, which is what we had bargained for,” Zuckerman said. He didn’t name the property or owner.
Zuckerman’s company owned or had stakes in 153 properties with 43.4 million rentable square feet, including eight properties under construction, as of March 31, it said in its latest quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The buildings are mostly in the New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington and Princeton, New Jersey, areas.
To contact the reporter on this story: Noah Rayman in New York at nrayman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net
June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Mort Zuckerman, chairman of Boston Properties Inc., talks about the firm's operations and the Manhattan commercial real estate market. Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and U.S. News and World Report, also discusses marketing and advertising strategies for those publications. He speaks with Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers." (Source: Bloomberg)
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