Developer investor Prologis has snapped up the former Arcadia warehouse in Daventry under the noses of the likes of Ebay, Amazon and JDSports for more than £60 million from the administrators Deloitte in a ‘best bid’ battle.
In the same breath it has already let the 1.2 million sq ft facility to Boohoo on a long lease thought to be around 15 years at a rent believed to be close to £7 per sq ft.
The sale of the property means that Sir Philip Green will be repaid the £50m loan he personally advanced to Arcadia against the property in 2019 as part of an emergency restructuring of the Arcadia Group.
Green did try to secure a further £50m against the property last year as reported in the Logistics Manager
Arcadia originally paid Prologis £40m for the freehold of the site at the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal (DIRFT) scheme in 2016.
Prologis built the facility for a reported £29.4m. The state of the art warehouse totals 1.2m sq ft with a base floor print of 404,000 sq ft with a number of mezzanines and 40,000 sq ft of three storey offices.
British online fashion retailer Boohoo has said it expects to invest a further £50m in the facility which will help boost its sales capacity to more than £4 billion.
It is scheduled to become operational in the second quarter of its 2021-22 year.
The deal is expected to secure up to 500 jobs and in the future create up to a further 1,000 jobs as capacity increases at the site.
In February the group purchased the Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton brands from the administrators of Arcadia for £25.2 million and the Debenhams brand out of administration for £55 million.
In January this year Logistics Manager reported that boohoo has secured the 287,634 sq ft former House of Fraser distribution centre in Wellingborough to service its Nasty Gal, Karen Millen, Coast, Oasis and Warehouse brands.
