Hanwha REIT to buy Hanwha Group office building for $584 mn

Hanwha REIT Co., a real estate investment arm of South Korea’s No. 7 conglomerate Hanwha Group, said on Monday that it is poised to acquire the group’s headquarters building for 808 billion won ($584.2 million) from Hanwha Life Insurance Co.

Located in the heart of Seoul’s Central Business District (CBD), the landmark office building has 82,645 square meters of floor area with a 100% occupancy rate.

The sale price per square meter is similar to prime office space transactions in the same business district over the past four years, which were in the range of 10.3 million won to 12.1 million won per square meter, Hanwha REIT said.

Hanwha REIT said the office building was renovated for more than 200 billion won in 2019 and that the property management will not incur much additional costs. 

Hanwha REIT’s total assets will increase to 1.62 trillion won if the deal is clinched.

With the increase in assets, the real estate investment firm eyes more stable payouts of its dividends, credit rating improvement and inclusion in the FTSE EPRA Nareit Global REITs Index, a free-float adjusted, market cap-weighted index to track the performance of listed real estate firms, to attract more funds from global investors.

Hanwha REIT will hold a shareholders’ meeting on July 31 to vote on the acquisition of the office building. The real estate investor plans to complete the transaction by August 28 of this year.

Write to Byeong-Hun Yang at hun@hankyung.com

Jihyun Kim edited this article.