Watling Real Estate, which launched from the management buyout of the real estate restructuring division of Avison Young on 1 June this year, has hit the ground running.
Results from the new firm’s first quarter show that Watling Real Estate notched up £130 million worth of deals in both its traditional core markets and in alternative sectors.
Highlights across the UK included £62.5 million of residential and part complete developments, £35 million in hotel sales, and £20 million in industrial and distribution sales.
During 1 June to 31 August, Watling Real Estate was appointed to handle the sale of the Dissington Estate.
Andrew Foster, joint receiver and managing director at Watling Real Estate’s Leeds office, said: “The Dissington Estate extends to a total of some 2,523 acres, which is one of the largest ever – if not the largest ever – receivership appointments ever to have been made in the UK.”
Watling also negotiated, and signed as receivers, a joint venture agreement with Hargreaves Land on a 550 acre residential development scheme at the Lincolnshire Lakes site in Gunness, near Scunthorpe.
Alan Ryall, joint managing director, said:” It has been an incredibly busy first three months across our national business on both the advisory and transactional fronts.
“We continue to advise across a number of significant restructuring assignments covering the food and beverage, and retail and leisure sectors, with a notable increase in work within the development finance and central London office markets.
“We have made our first hire in Manchester with more to follow, further strengthening our agency function.”
The business is headquartered in London with a network of offices in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol, providing national coverage with the benefit of local and regional expertise. It has a team of 20+ professionals offering a multi-disciplinary real estate advisory business and, when launched, immediately become one of the UK’s largest real estate restructuring consultancies.
The team, originally part of the GVA business and more recently Avison Young post-merger in 2019, is one of the most highly regarded and experienced real estate advisors operating within the restructuring and recovery marketplace. Over the past decade, the team has advised or transacted on real estate with a total value of over £11 billion, having worked on some of the most significant real estate restructuring projects in the UK.
Watling Real Estate is backed by Bassi Capital, a private family office with extensive core investments in the real estate sector including publicly listed companies, private limited companies, and joint partnerships.