One company owns almost as much land in the capital as Transport of London and the Queen together, new figures by Datscha have revealed.
The study was put together for trade bible Property Week and showed that the Canary Wharf Group, a company jointly owned by Qatari Diar and Brookfield, is London’s biggest landowner with exactly 21,452,796 sq ft of property.
In second place was the City of London, or the Mayor and Community and Citizens of the City of London to go by the official name, with a total of 17.4m sq ft of space.
These were followed by Transport of London, Aviva and BNP Paribas. All of them – surprisingly – own more of London than the Queen, who can call 7.3m of the capital’s sq ft her own.
The highest-ranked non-property company was Tesco securing spot 19 with 3.4m sq ft of property.
Qatar, which is about the same size as Yorkshire, has built up its impressive UK property portfolio in less than ten years. In 2015, it amassed a huge area when it and Brookfield decided to buy Canary Wharf owner Songbird Estates for £2.6bn, as City AM reports.
Soon, however, the Qataris may have to make space for another big, foreign player. Chinese companies have already shown huge interest in the capital’s property and also made their first big moves. One of the biggest ones was British Land and Oxford Properties selling the Cheesegrater to Chinese CC Land.
