Leeds property consultancy, GV&Co has advised bottled water producer, Penmoor (UK), which trades as Shepley Spring, on its £13.3 million acquisition of a 276,000 sq ft building at Flaxby Moor in Knaresborough, which will create one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in Europe.
This latest deal means GV&Co has let, sold and refurbished the building in recent years, before advising on its latest acquisition which has now completed.
Shepley Spring has been producing bottled water in Shepley near Huddersfield for over 20 years and took over the site following the insolvency of its previous occupier, Ilke Homes.
GV&Co’s agency division was initially appointed by printing company, RR Donnelley, which used to produce the Yellow Pages at Flaxby, to let the building in 2017. Ilke Homes subsequently opened its modular homes business in 2018, and GV&Co’s building surveying and project management was appointed to manage a substantial repair and refurbishment programme, with Ilke Homes remaining in situ throughout.
Soon afterwards, GV&Co negotiated the off-market sale of the freehold of the property to Harworth Group plc, which was advised by CBRE on its sale to Shepley Spring.
Today the site comprises a large open plan building, with offices, car parking and its own roundabout off the A59 and next to the A1(M). Work is already complete converting the property into a water extraction and bottling plant, which will abstract the water on site and filter it, as well as making and filling the bottles.
Shepley Spring expects to extract more than a billion litres of high-quality water every year and will be able to produce over 104,000 bottles of water per hour using machinery engineered specifically for the company, allowing it to automate most of the process.
Paul Mack, a director at GV&Co, said: “We were instructed by Shepley Spring to work alongside a specialist hydrologist and lead an extensive search for a building that could accommodate a substantial production facility, but crucially it needed access to vast amounts of high-quality water.
“We therefore focussed the search on the Sherwood Sandstone Aquifer, which is one of the most prominent sources of groundwater in the UK and is found across areas of the North of England and the Midlands.
“We considered numerous buildings, but our in-depth knowledge of the Flaxby Moor site made it an immediate contender. As a company, we have a long history with the property having now acquired, let, sold and refurbished this building, so we genuinely know it inside out. It’s also in a great location, with immediate access to the A1(M), and if offers a huge amount of space, which all appealed to Shepley Spring as the company now prepares to open one of the most advanced bottled water production facilities in Europe.”
James Smith, managing director of Shepley Spring, said: “We have been looking to expand our operations for over five years, but our strict requirement for a high-quality water source in a centralised location failed to yield any results.
“GV&Co’s expertise in the industrial property market, as well as the team’s knowledge of this specific building, was hugely valuable and meant we could complete the acquisition and start work on our new facility in a very short timeframe.
“We’re now looking forward to start production in the coming weeks in our state-of-the-art facility that integrates sustainability into every aspect. This means we can produce the lightest bottles on the market, that crucially remain rigid, and when this is combined with our smaller labels, renewable energy generation and central location, it all contributes towards us reducing our impact on the environment.”
“Our plan is to continue growing and improving in each of these areas to make Shepley Spring the best water supplier, community partner and employer that we can be.”
