Travis Perkins announces acquisition of major South Croydon industrial site

Travis Perkins plc, the UK’s largest distributor of building materials and a partner to the construction industry, has announced the purchase of a 6.25 acre industrial goods yard in Selsdon, South Croydon.

The site, which is split into seven plots, was purchased from The Arch Company on a 146-year head lease and is part of the Group’s long term property development strategy to invest in sites for the Group’s businesses to create destination branches delivering enhanced product ranges and value-added services for trade customers.

This goods yard in Selsdon is located near the M23/M25 intersection to provide easy access for trade customers serving the City of London and the capital’s West End, which are within 13 miles of the site. The site is adjacent to the railway, but does not include any railway arches.

With essential services, such as builders merchants, increasingly being pushed further out of urban conurbations, this investment will help to ensure that construction customers serving the capital and surrounding areas will have easy access to building materials locally.

Nick Pinney, Group Property Director, commented: “At Travis Perkins Group we continually review our property portfolio to identify value creation opportunities.

“The Selsdon property is a high-quality asset that will give us a great opportunity to develop a site that will feature one of the largest Travis Perkins general merchant branches in the country, enhance our wider customer proposition in Croydon and secure our presence there for the longer term.”

Craig McWilliam, CEO of The Arch Company, added: “We’re delighted to sell this site to one of our existing customers, Travis Perkins plc.

“We are focused on investing in our core estate of arches and former railway properties, and we’ll use proceeds from this sale to continue funding Project 1000, our £200m plan to bring a thousand empty and derelict spaces into use by 2030.”

The build area at the Selsdon site can easily be re-configured to suit the Travis Perkins Group portfolio, which alongside the Travis Perkins general merchant also includes Toolstation and the specialist building materials distributors BSS, Keyline and CCF.

Travis Perkins plc currently has a freehold property portfolio valued at around £1.1bn with the market value of the estate having grown by almost £600m since 2010. During this period, the Group’s active management of the portfolio has also generated net proceeds after reinvestment of over £100m and profits of over £300m.

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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