Award winning developer, Allied London, has been given a £16.5million senior loan to finance enabling work on its St John’s scheme in Manchester.
The loan was provided by the North West Evergreen Fund to finance the refurbishment of The Bonded Warehouse, as well as the pre-development and infrastructure works for the wider St John’s development, including Manchester Goods, Yard St. John’s Place, One Granada Studios and the South Village.
St John’s will create a new neighbourhood in Manchester on the old Granada Studios site, occupying 1 million sq ft. The completed development will provide a mixture of use types ranging across office, hotel, leisure, residential and flexible workspace and event space as well as a variety of independent shops, cafés and restaurants.
The North West Evergreen Fund is managed by CBRE’s Debt Investment Advisory team, part of CBRE Capital Advisors, and provides debt funding for commercial property and regeneration projects in the North West of England.
This loan is the Evergreen’s fifteenth since inception as the Fund continues to support development in the region. It has provided £200million of finance, recycling and reinvesting its capital and supporting developments with a combined value of over £1billion.
The Fund was recently re-capitalised to over £100 million and continues to support North-West developments that require finance.
Michael Ingall, Chief Executive of Allied London, comments: “St. John’s is a major development project; our current intention is to develop the entire project in one extended phase which will involve significant development funding. Whilst we put all the pieces into place, we have secured funding from Evergreen for early infrastructure and enabling works together with the development of the Bonded Warehouse – which will be the initial anchor building for Enterprise City, due to open in early 2018. This is our third transaction with Evergreen and we are delighted to have established such a solid relationship”.
Eamonn Boylan, Chief Executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, said: “I am very pleased that Evergreen will be used as the catalytic funding of this strategic project. St John’s will support the regeneration of a once important employment site into a transformational employment, leisure and housing development. Providing this type of necessary infrastructure for the growth of our region is exactly why Evergreen exists.”
Andrew Antoniades, Head of CBRE’s Debt Investment Advisory, said: “We are delighted to have provided the funding for this strategically vital scheme and to support Allied London in their exciting vision for a thriving new neighbourhood in central Manchester. St John’s is an incredibly dynamic scheme and underscores the need for Evergreen to kick-start developments that will have wide reaching socio-economic benefits to the region”.
