Billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel buys £95m London home
Ken Griffin’s purchase of No 3 Carlton Gardens comes amid high-end property market slump
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the $28bn hedge fund Citadel, has bought a Georgian house near Buckingham Palace in a commitment of about £95m to central London’s real estate as Brexit approaches.
Mr Griffin “recently purchased 3 Carlton Gardens in St James’s”, according to Julie Andreeff Jensen, his spokesperson. “It is an historic property with a spectacular location, extraordinary elegance and stunning gardens,” she said of the house that shares a driveway with the UK foreign secretary’s official residence. “It is truly a unique opportunity to own a home in London.”
The deal comes amid a slump in the market for high-end London homes, that after a period of runaway price growth have been hit by tax changes and the prospect of the UK leaving the EU.
Prices for homes in the UK capital’s most exclusive districts fell 18.4 per cent between their 2014 peak and late last year, according to estate agent Savills.
The Grade II*-listed 1820s home sold for about £95m, according to people familiar with the purchase. An asking price of £145m was originally discussed but in the past two years the house was marketed for £125m. At least five people bid to buy it, said one person familiar with the deal.
It has been freshly redeveloped by the high-end property developer Mike Spink, complete with a pool, staff quarters and private gardens. Mr Spink bought the property for £65.5m in 2013 in partnership with the private equity investors Evans Randall.
Before then the house was used by the UK’s secret intelligence service MI6 to interview potential recruits.
According to two former Whitehall officials, the building was used to impress candidates before they were offered roles at less distinguished locations, including the service’s former headquarters at Century House in Lambeth or its current home at Vauxhall.
Mr Griffin, whose net worth Forbes estimates at about $9.9bn, founded the Chicago-based multistrategy hedge fund Citadel in 1990 after he began trading convertible bonds from his dormitory at Harvard University. The fund has been building headcount in its London office in recent years.
While many hedge funds struggled through the volatile markets in the fourth quarter of last year, Citadel’s flagship Wellington fund gained more than 9 per cent. Its global equities and tactical trading funds returned almost 6 per cent and 9 per cent respectively.
In 2001 Mr Griffin established Citadel Securities, a market-making firm separate from the hedge fund, which has grown to become one of the world’s largest market-makers.
Mr Griffin, 50, already owns an extensive portfolio of properties in the US. His new London purchase is at the heart of the city’s government district and was associated, along with No 4, with Charles de Gaulle, former French president, during the second world war.
Mr Griffin reportedly owns the top four floors of the Chicago condominium No 9 Walton, which he bought for $58.75m in late 2017. He owns three other properties in Chicago, and a $200m apartment in New York that occupies three floors of Manhattan’s 220 Central Park South skyscraper.
The fund manager has also bought six properties in the Palm Beach area in Florida for about $230m, a $60m condo in Miami and two homes in Hawaii for just over $28m.