Aldo Attanasio d'Aponte

Everyone could see Queensway was tired. The question was whether you believed that was permanent.

A few years ago, an agent friend working on the Whiteleys redevelopment — London’s first department store, opened in 1911, now being reborn at a cost of hundreds of millions — showed me the vision for the street. I remember thinking: this is not a mood board. This is serious, committed capital, at scale. And when money of that size commits to a street, the street changes. The only question is when.

You cannot buy Whiteleys. But you can buy the street around it.

The corner nobody wanted

At the end of 2023 we found a corner property at auction, at the unfashionable end of Queensway. It did not present well: two tenants on long leases, £83,000 of passing rent, nothing to photograph. We won it for our client at £1.9m.

Then came the part that auctions do not price: twelve months of patient negotiation to agree surrender terms with both tenants, a new lease of the restaurant to a first-class brunch operator, and a proper renovation of the apartments above.

The rent today is £184,000. The property has just been valued at £3m.

What the deal actually teaches

It would be easy to tell this as a story about cleverness. It is really a story about three quieter things.

First, information is not the same as insight. The Whiteleys project was public. The funding was visible. Anyone could have drawn the conclusion we drew. The edge was not knowing something secret; it was believing what the street was telling us — roughly eighteen months before the market priced it in — and acting on that belief at a scale our client could afford.

Second, regeneration ripples outward, and the ripple is purchasable. The flagship scheme absorbs the headlines and the institutional capital. The value for a private investor sits in the ordinary buildings around it — the corner sites, the tired parades — which reprice later, and which come in sizes a family can actually buy.

Third, the unglamorous work is the return. The auction took one morning. The value was created across the following year — in negotiated surrenders, in choosing the right operator rather than the first one, in a renovation done properly. Buying well starts the story. Managing well finishes it.

The rule I take from it

The best opportunities are rarely beautiful when you buy them. That is precisely why they are still available. If a building is already photographing well, its owner knows what it is worth — and so does everyone else in the room.

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Aldo Attanasio d’Aponte is the founder and chief executive of Arbitrage Group, a boutique buyer-side advisory specialising in prime central London real estate. Figures relate to a completed client transaction and are published with consent. This article is general commentary and not financial, legal or tax advice.