Financial Times- The long-awaited consolidation of the UK’s publicly listed property sector began yesterday after Mapeley, an outsourcing group, received a takeover approach from US hedge fund Fortress, its majority shareholder.
The US investment group is understood to have offered about £19 per share to take the property company private. Mapeley is based in the tax haven of Guernsey, a British crown dependency off the coast of France.
The approach is seen by analysts as the first of many deals in the UK property sector, where companies are considered to be undervalued after a widespread sell-off of shares over the past year.
Certain companies have been trading at discounts of more than 40 per cent to their net asset value, although the value of their properties has fallen sharply over the past six months.
