City apartments worth £4m put in hands of receiver

Jul 3 2008 by Alex Turner, Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL city centre apartments with a market value of nearly £4m were placed with receivers yesterday as the credit crunch continues to hit the property market.

Property developer City Lofts decided to place in administration its unsold Princes Dock apartments and about 230 unsold apartments at other developments, together with undeveloped land in Birmingham.

The other apartments are in Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and Cardiff.

The 162-apartment development at Liverpool’s Princes Dock, which includes two linked 20- and 10- storey residential towers, was completed in 2006, but the company has been unable to sell all of the apartments.

City Lofts said it had called in the receiver as part of its strategy to adapt to difficult market conditions.

In a statement, the company said: “This move is part of a restructur-ing process which City Lofts has been pursuing in light of the ex-tremely difficult market conditions which it and many other house-builders and residential developers are experiencing in the UK.

“City Lofts is hopeful that the plan to restructure its businesses can be successfully concluded in as short a time as possible.”

Yesterday, the company refused to discuss the restructure or the position of its other developments, other than to say the rest of the business was trading as normal.

One of the firm’s other develop-ments, which has not been placed into receivership, is a joint venture with David McLean to build 429 apartments in three towers at Kings Waterfront, near to the Echo Arena. City Lofts was also respon-sible for a nine-storey building of 121 apartments at Half Tide Dock, near to its Princes Dock site.

Jon Gershinon, a partner at property consultants Allsop, has been appointed as the receiver by Bank of Scotland Corporate, City Lofts’ principal bank.