Uni hires CBRE to offload £80m Castle Meadow
The University of Nottingham is set to double down on efforts to dispose of its city centre enterprise campus, around seven months after first deciding to put the site up for sale.
The university has appointed CBRE’s capital markets and development team to help find a buyer for its Castle Meadow Campus, the former HMRC office complex which it purchased for £37.5m in 2021, and subsequently spent upwards of £40m redeveloping for educational use.
The Wilford Road site was intended to provide a base for a new business and enterprise school, supposedly bringing together academic research and city businesses under its 10.6-acre footprint.
Work was completed at the campus in 2024, but in November last year the university announced it would become the first victim of plans to reduce the size of its estate, which it said cost an estimated £100m to run annually.
It said the decision to put the Castle Meadow Campus up for sale had come in response to a “changed financial landscape”, adding that the campus no longer aligned with its strategic priorities.
Gary Moss, chief property and facilities officer at the University of Nottingham, said: “This sale is part of the University of Nottingham’s long-term estates strategy to reduce the overall size of our estate to ensure the University can provide the best experiences for our staff and students.
“We appreciate the importance of this site to the local area, and we are keen to collaborate closely with CBRE to find the right investor as the sale will no doubt generate further investment and growth for Nottingham City Centre.”
The campus was originally designed by award-winning architect Sir Michael Hopkins and is renowned for being the first UK building to achieve maximum points in BREEAM’s Environmental Assessment.
Originally built for HM Revenues and Customs, the government occupied the site from its completion in 1994 until the sale of the seven buildings which make up the campus in 2021.
Tom Nock, associate director in the capital markets team at CBRE, said the campus offered purchasers the opportunity for income from the buildings currently leased, and provided an opportunity to undertake a potential repositioning exercise for other individual buildings on the site.
“This is a rare opportunity to invest in a city centre site of considerable scale, situated in an established and vibrant area, and that also has significant value-add and repositioning prospects,” he said.
“The economic hub of the East Midlands, Nottingham is a city that is currently benefitting from significant and planned investment. This is the perfect chance for an investor to capitalise on Nottingham’s continued growth and development.”
