Bayleys to manage Blackstone portfolio

The VXV portfolio includes Bayleys' own leased head office building at 30 Gaunt St. Photo / Supplied

Bayleys Property Services has been appointed as property manager for a portfolio of seven office buildings in central Auckland for global real estate investor Blackstone Group.

Following a competitive tender process, Bayleys Property Services (BPS) was selected by 151 Property - Blackstone's management platform responsible for managing its Australasian assets - to provide the day-to-day property and facilities management services for the buildings. The buildings are located in Wynyard Quarter and Viaduct Harbour and encompass about 89,000sq m of office space.

"This is an exciting opportunity for Bayleys and is one of the largest outsourced property management contracts to be awarded in New Zealand in the past five years," says Stuart Bent, Bayleys Property Services general manager.

He says the VXV portfolio includes Bayleys' own leased head office building at 30 Gaunt St as well as the New Zealand headquarters of Fonterra, Air New Zealand, Datacom, KPMG, HP and Microsoft. It also contains the former Vodafone head office building now occupied by Auckland Transport.

Bent says the appointment takes the value of property managed by BPS to in excess of $3 billion.

"BPS has built a strong capability in all aspects of commercial property management which provides the platform to support 151 Property with delivering on their investment objectives.

"In particular, our strategic partnership with Augusta Funds Management over the past few years has been fundamental to getting us into a position to take on portfolios of this size," he says.

The VXV office portfolio was previously jointly owned by the Goodman Property Trust and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC. Goodman announced in December that Overseas Investment Office approval had been received for the sale of the portfolio. The transaction had a gross sales price of $635m.