Vedanta Hedging client, Market Tech, speaks with Property Week

Market Tech Holdings, the property company behind the 2014 real estate purchase of parts of the Camden Town area of London, spoke with the magazine, Property Week, recently regarding plans to bring ‘cool’ back to the area. In the article, Market Tech CEO, Charles Butler, talks about his ongoing plans to bring people back to the area by bringing together a mixture of apartments, retail and leisure facilities. Butler remains positive that the area will see growth in the coming years;

“This year has been a year of progress and it’s been incredibly busy. We’ve had a big equity raise, we’ve secured long-term debt refinancing and we moved from AIM to the main market. Those are costly events. We don’t envisage having to do any of those things again imminently, so while our cost base has been heavy this year, it has all been about positioning.”

Butler states that Market Tech’s overarching aim is to create “an eco-system” where people can live, work and play. By focusing on this trinity of factors, he feels that Londoners especially will be enticed back to the area. The reasoning behind focusing on Londoners specifically is down to Market Tech’s research, which has shown that 50% of the visitors to Camden Town come from overseas, 25% originating from Greater London and 25% from the rest of the UK; in other words, Londoners have drifted away to other up-and-coming locales such as Shoreditch and further afield. Remarking on this, Butler states;

“People have a lot of affection for Camden but it doesn’t always offer what they want,” he says. “There aren’t the right restaurants; there aren’t the right bars – people go to the West End for that – so really what we want to do is to provide more for Londoners.”

Vedanta Hedging advise Market Tech on derivative risk management and have previously been assisting Market Tech with refinancing £900m of debt. This involved refinancing from Nomura Bank to AIG Asset Management. You can read more about this case by clicking here.

To read more about Market Tech and its plans for Camden Market, please click here.