BNP Paribas Real Estate Investment Management has sold Pinners Hall in the City to an unnamed Asian investor for more than the asking price of £92.5m.The building on 105-108 Old Broad Street is the British Bankers' Association's former HQ. Other tenants of the 109,500 square feet (sq ft) building, which is located close to Liverpool Street station, include Deutsche Bank.
Stephen Pearson, head of City investment at CBRE, which advised on the deal, said: “This purchase is yet another example of the continued demand from overseas investors for prime London real estate, particularly from Asia."The capital remains one of the world’s most pre-eminent destinations, despite short-term political uncertainties and is at the forefront of on-going investment strategies.”In March, Chinese billionaire Cheung Chung-kiu's firm CC Land snapped up the Cheesegrater for £1.15bn in the second-biggest ever sale of a UK building.The property giant's deputy chairman Dickie Wong told City A.M. that CC Land is on a look out for more iconic London buildings to add to its portfolio."The City offers a lot of opportunities for us as there are a lot of new developments here. We would like to buy iconic buildings and there aren't too many around apart from the City area," he said.Nearly £5bn worth of commercial property transactions took place between January and March in London this year in what was the biggest quarterly total since the end of 2014, according to CBRE.A total of 13 deals worth £100m or more were conducted in the first quarter of 2017, compared with 11 in the previous quarter.