Insurer to sell London skyscraper for nearly $1B
GREENWICH — Insurance giant W.R. Berkley announced this week that it had agreed to sell for about $960 million the London skyscraper known as The Scalpel, which houses its European headquarters — but the company has not signaled that it will leave the building.
Greenwich-headquartered Berkley will sell the 42-story tower at 52 Lime St., in the London financial district, to Singapore-based real estate firm Ho Bee Land whose portfolio includes several other office buildings in London.
“London has proved to be very resilient in spite of Brexit and the pandemic. It has been able to maintain its position as a key global financial hub with a robust office investment market,” Ho Bee Land CEO Nicholas Chua said in a statement. “We are very excited to be able to seize this rare opportunity to acquire a landmark office tower which ticks all the boxes for quality, distinction and sustainability. We remain confident of London’s long-term economic prospects and attractiveness to global investors.”
Berkley, the No. 372 company on the 2021 Fortune 500 list, said in its own statement that the sale is “in keeping with the company’s long-term strategy of investing for total return in order to continue delivering superior longterm value creation to shareholders despite a low interest rate environment.” The statement added the company estimates that it will realize a pretax gain of more than $300 million in the first quarter of this year.
The company opened the European headquarters at The Scalpel after the building’s completion in early 2019. It maintains offices there for W/R/B Underwriting, Berkley Re UK and couple of its U.S.-based businesses. The company has not disclosed any plans to relocate from The Scalpel, whose sale is scheduled to be completed on March 7.
Architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox designed The Scalpel. The name refers to the skyscraper’s distinctive design.
“Its form enabled improvements to the north-south route through the city block and the creation of a new public plaza, recalling Lime Street Square, which was lost in the 1940s, at the center of a group of buildings that includes Lloyds of London and the Willis building,” KPF says in a description of the building, on its website. “The tower leans away from Leadenhall (Street) so as to be invisible behind the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral when approached from the west on Fleet Street, and the roofline falls away sharply to the south in recognition of the overall composition of the City cluster.”
Among other real estate transactions in recent years, Berkley leased in 2020 about 63,000 square feet for subsidiary Berkley Insurance Co., at the Metro Center complex at 1 Station Place in downtown Stamford.
Berkley’s global headquarters is at 475 Steamboat Road in Greenwich. The company employs about 7,500.
The company represents one of the largest writers of commercial lines of insurance in the U.S. Its gross premiums written in 2021 totaled nearly $11 billion, up about 20 percent from 2020.