Lend Lease, the Australian property and financial services group, confirmed plans yesterday to sell its directly owned 30% stake in the Bluewater shopping centre at the Dartford tunnel in Kent.
However, group chief executive Greg Clarke said his company was in no hurry to offload the stake, which could be worth more than £400m.
With Lend Lease keen to hang on to its role of managing the complex, which boasts more than 300 retail outlets, the stake is seen as more likely to interest institutional investors rather than property rivals such as British Land, Liberty International or Hammerson.
In an interview on Australian television Mr Clarke confirmed that Lend Lease plans to divest the 30% holding but added: "What I don't want to do is to give it too much sense of urgency because it won't be this year; it might not be next year; it will be when the value proposition will be right for shareholders."
Yesterday Lend Lease made it clear that it intended to keep its 4.9% holding in the Retail Partnership, which owns another 25% of Bluewater. The other shareholders in the shopping complex are the Prudential, which has the largest stake at 35%, and Hermes Property Asset Management.
News that the stake will be sold has sparked speculation that it could attract interest from rival groups such as British Land, which owns the Meadowhall complex in Sheffield and from Liberty which has the Lakeside centre just round the M25 from Bluewater.
However Andrew Penny, property analyst at JP Morgan Securities in London, said a UK institutional investor was a more likely buyer for the 30% stake. "Some of the property companies in the listed sector have their own real estate retail strategy. I don't know if they would be interested in a 30% stake. They would want to manage [Bluewater] themselves.
"I think it would be more likely to attract a more passive investor like an insurance company or a pension fund."
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