Gladman Developments has r eleased more than £100 million of new funds to spend on the acquisition of land through a major disposal of its office developments.
Cheshire-based Gladman Developments, the UK's largest developer of speculative office and industrial space, is targeting sites in the West Midlands with the equity released by disposing of its portfolio of 28 office village schemes across the UK.
"These are additional funds on top of the more than £50 million which we spend on acquiring land each year for speculative development, so we expect our development team to be very busy and agents throughout the Midlands to be putting forward increasing numbers of sites for us to look at," said Glad-man Developments' director David Gladman.
Tim Matthews, development manager at Gladman Development and former Director at Lambert Smith Hampton in Birmingham, also said: "We are looking for sites of three acres and above suitable for our office or industrial developments. We pay introductory fees and always retain agents."
Gladman Developments' new funds come from a series of deals completed in the past two months. It has sold nine office developments to Close Brothers for its Close High Income Properties Fund for £39.1 million at an initial yield of around seven per cent.
Frogmore has also acquired 13 office schemes in a deal worth more than £50 million. A further six schemes have been sold to private investors in a series of smaller transactions driven by the recent changes in SIPPs regulations.
In the West Midlands Gladman Developments has disposed of office village developments in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Burton-onTrent, Stafford Technology Park, Wolverhampton and Hanley.
The reason for the deal was to free up equity for new investment and to prevent the company being tied up in long term management.
In the Midlands, Gladman Developments is presently developing more than 350,000 sq ft of new speculative office space at developments in Cannock, Huntingdon, Northampton, Peterborough, Rugby, Stafford and Stratford.
