A MALAYSIAN property fund has teamed up with London-based Castleforge to buy Deutsche Bank's current London base in Moorgate for just over a quarter of a billion pounds - in what amounts to a big bet on the capital's commercial property market.

Castleforge and its Malaysian partner Gamuda plan to refurbish and upgrade the building - which is due to be vacated by the German bank next year - to provide a "bestin-class, top-rated, environmentally sustainable ESG office space catering to... financial institutions, legal firms and mega-tech corporations".

Gamuda said they then plan to sell the building no later than five years after, having locked in "quality tenants".

The plans include bumping up the building from an existing eight storeys to eleven.

Deutsche is leaving the building, which had been owned by an

English property partnership, for a new UK headquarters atop Moorgate station.

Last night, Antony Antoniou, chief executive of real estate agency and investment specialists Robert Irving Burns, told City A.M. that

London remained "the 'go-to' place to invest" in Europe.

"While the office market has not been immune to the wider downturns, there is a real flight to quality in the sector, and those buildings with state of the art sustainable features or capable of being upgraded are most in demand," he said.

(c) 2023 City A.M., source Newspaper