Phoenix Property sells Tokyo apartment building for JPY 20B

Hong Kong-based Phoenix Property Investors has sold an apartment building in Tokyo for JPY 20 billion ($180 million), just 30 months after buying the property in the Shinagawa area.

The private equity shop headed by financiers Benjamin Lee and Samuel Chu announced that it had sold the Oakwood Residence Shinagawa to a Korean institutional investor on behalf of its Phoenix Asia Real Estate Investments V fund, with the transaction completed on 27 December.

A local Korean industry source told Mingtiandi that Seoul-based asset manager Korean Investment Management had raised funds to acquire a Tokyo serviced apartment with that acquisition being reported has having been completed on the same date as the Oakwood disposal.

“With our partnership with Oakwood, a globally recognized serviced apartment operator, and our expertise in asset management, we successfully increased the asset’s value by upgrading the building, and the income of the building has been significantly increased,” a Phoenix spokesperson told Mingtiandi.

After converting the sixteen-year-old property from rental residences into a 202-room serviced apartment facility, at the reported prices Phoenix would have sold the 18,847 square metre (202,867 square foot) property for the equivalent of JPY 1.06 million per square metre.

Located within a cluster of office blocks in Tokyo’s Shinagawa business district that house the corporate headquarters of Canon, Microsoft Japan, and Philips Electronics Japan, the serviced apartment has been operated by LA-based Oakwood since opening in its new format in 2018.

Studio rooms at the Oakwood Residence Shinagawa, which is within six hundred metres of the Shinagawa station transportation hub and ten minutes from Tokyo’s city centre, are currently available at $3,720 for the minimum 30 day rental period. Singapore’s Mapletree Investments bought out Oakwood in 2017 for an undisclosed sum.

Ref: Property Report