Enterprise Inns hopes to raise £13m in latest sale and leaseback auction
Enterprise Inns hopes to raise nearly £13m in the latest sale and leaseback auction of some of its London pubs, including a former haunt of infamous East End gangsters the Kray twins.
The Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road, which was the scene of the murder of George Cornell by Ronnie Kray in 1966, is to go under the hammer along with nine other pubs in the capital which Enterprise plans to lease back once they have been sold.
The auction, to be hosted by Allsop on May 17, will be the latest in a spate of such sell-offs which started last year and which have seen Enterprise dispose of dozens of its London pubs and raise more than £35m, with most of the proceeds going to pay off the group's debts.
Other pubs in the forthcoming auction include the Grafton Arms in Kentish Town, North London; the Nell of Old Drury in Covent Garden and the Rosalyn Arms in Hampstead.
The total rent bill for the 10 pubs comes in at £895,000, a yield of nearly seven per cent.
Despite getting away all its pubs which up for grabs in the initial sale and leaseback auctions, recent sales have seen a number of Enterprise's pubs either failing to sell or being withdrawn before proceedings got under way.
However such disappointments appear not to have dented the pubco's determination to continue in tapping into what its senior management sees as a recovering property market, with the sales that do take place "underpinning the group's balance sheet", in the words of chief executive Ted Tuppen.
That said, Tuppen, who argued last year that Enterprise could sell off at least 100 sites in sale and leaseback auctions, will be hoping that the name of one of the 10 pubs due to go on the block next month does not prove prescient: A Bar 2 Far, in Mitcham, South London.
