At a glance
GRE Capital agreed an 18-month senior loan of £15.0m secured over a purpose-built health and racquets club of 64,407 sq ft on Woodstock Road in North Oxford, let to Nuffield Health. The facility funded the freeholder’s buy back of the long leasehold interest, consolidating ownership ahead of a restructuring of the title.
The brief
The freeholder, an independent school, granted a 99-year lease over part of its North Oxford campus in 2000, retaining a right of pre-emption. With the leasehold interest becoming available, the school required a structured funding solution to exercise that right to a fixed timetable and bring the club back into single ownership.
The GRE solution
GRE Capital provided a fully serviced 18-month facility sized against the club’s income rather than the complexity of the title. The asset is let on a full repairing and insuring lease running to 2046 with upward only annual RPI uplifts, leaving operating costs with the tenant and producing rent comfortably in excess of the facility’s interest cost. Limited competing leisure supply in an affluent, planning constrained part of Oxford supports one of Nuffield’s strongest performing clubs nationally.
The outcome
The buyback completed to the pre-emption timetable and the club returned to single ownership for the first time in 25 years. With the facility in place the school has been able to take the restructuring at its own pace, collapsing the leasehold into its superior title, carving the club out as a standalone freehold and preparing a new 250-year long leasehold for the institutional long income market, while opening regear discussions with the tenant.
