Standard Life Selling Four Office Properties

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND-Standard Life Assurance Co., one of Europe’s largest mutual life firms, is looking to sell four local office properties. The locally headquartered company occupies about one million sf in Edinburgh, where it employs some 9,400 people.A company source tells GlobeSt.com that Standard has disposed of 11 office blocks here over the past eight years in an ongoing effort to consolidate into fewer, larger buildings. These latest properties to come to market are a continuation of that effort to operate more efficiently, she says. “We have three large buildings in different parts of town,” she says. “The people in the surplus buildings will be absorbed into those larger buildings.”Standard’s main offices are located on George Street and Lonthian Road. The properties being sold are located on Dundas Street, Thistle Lane Street, Leith and Canning Street. The largest of the four properties, the 60,000-sf Caledonian Exchange on Canning Street, is a newer office building, and the plan is to sell to an owner-user or lease it up and sell it off as investment real estate. The three smaller, older office properties are being marketed to homebuilders for residential redevelopment.Standard Life owns all four buildings outright. Jones Lang LaSalle has been retained to handle the disposition. JLL’s national partner for Scotland, Cameron Stott, will manage the process. The company source did not know if there was a deadline for unloading the buildings. Neither JLL nor Cameron Stott could be reached Tuesday for further comment.