British commercial property is down almost 40% from peak, a fact we sometimes overlook in Ireland when we are busy beating ourselves up. This decline has been masked by the relatively robust performance of the London market, where a lot of Irish-bought property has been sold off since 2009 – NAMA has been very active across London. But today, we are reminded that outside London, it is still grim with news from the UK’s commercial property portal, CoStar that NAMA developer, Alanis Capital has sold its landmark property, the 136,000 Met Quarter shopping centre in Liverpool for just GBP 21m (€25m) which is a whopping 76% less than the GBP 87m paid for the property in 2007.
The purchaser was Columbus UK Real Estate Fund. CoStar say the yield is 8.4% and that the price works out at GBP 154 (€183) psf.
Alanis is owned by the McCormack family who featured on here recently with news that NAMA is cutting a break to a company in which they have an interest, and is allowing rent arrears on hotels to be paid back over five years. Alanis was founded by John McCormack who runs the business with his sons, Alan, Brian and Niall. It is not clear if this building was subject to a NAMA loan or if NAMA had in fact any involvement in this particular sale.
NAMA Wine Lake 
Met Quarter was one of the properties included in the European Geared Property Fund which was sold by Anglo Irish Private Banking to its clients and is now subject to legal proceedings reported recently. Presumably Anglo was also the funder and the loan was therefore transferred to Nama.