At over 1.3 million square feet, Lotus Group’s £60m portfolio of mixed use, industrial, retail, and leisure buildings in Dundee, Scotland marks an important chapter in efforts to regenerate the city following a strong period of economic growth.
To help Lotus Group understand potential liabilities with its transaction, Tetra Tech provided environmental due diligence services.
Challenges
Significant waterfront regeneration and the arrival of culturally significant attractions like the Victoria & Albert Museum featured prominently among the properties acquired by the Northern Ireland-based firm.
A project dealing with this magnitude of assets across a large swathe of land requires significant resources devoted to it, plus interviews with numerous stakeholders to ascertain any environmental liabilities.
Yet, our team faced a two-week turnaround to complete the project.
Solutions
To overcome the scale, our team mobilized resources and expertise from across our various offices spread out over Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland. All our efforts were funneled toward the goal of ensuring our client fully understood potential risks before proceeding with the transaction.
For us to keep the client informed at all stages, we established a live Sharepoint-based reporting system to note red flags and highlight key issues.
We also carried out many site inspections personally to review current uses for active industrial properties and a wide range of other sites, from vehicle workshops to garages, waste management sites, and historic centres and land uses. The multidisciplinary nature of our team played a key factor in allowing us to note risks from different lenses that included various elements from drainage to waste.
Outcomes
In spite of a challenging deadline, our team completed its assessment in just two weeks, ultimately providing Lotus with the confidence it needed to proceed with its transaction.
Alan Dew, Principal Geo-environmental Consultant at Tetra Tech, said: “Dundee has cemented its place as a world leader in specialist technology, and people continue to flock there with the ambition of making it a centre for innovation in Scotland. We’re glad to have assisted Lotus Group in understanding potential environmental liabilities associated with this major property transaction. It will contribute significantly to the environmentally sustainable regeneration and economic development of the region.”
Roger Craig, Senior Portfolio Manager of Lotus Group, added: “Dundee is going through a really exciting and significant period of regeneration and we consider the city to be a key growth area in the UK. I am confident Dundee will become one of the UK’s next property investment hotspots and we are pleased to have completed this acquisition with the close support of Tetra Tech.”
The portfolio covers assets in the Marketgait/West Marketgait, Wester Gourdie Industrial Estate, and Dunsinane Industrial Estate.
