Wolverton's 29-unit Canon Industrial Estate has sold for about £28m, £147 a square foot. The seller paid £18.09m for it in 2019. What it means for tenants.
The industrial estate on Canons Road and Deans Road in Old Wolverton has been sold for about £28m.
The seller, DTZ Investors, published the sale on 11 September. The buyer is Chancerygate, an industrial developer and asset manager. The price works out at roughly £147 a square foot.
Chancerygate has published nothing about the purchase on its own website, checked on 21 September. Everything below comes from the seller’s announcement, from the announcement it made when it bought the estate in 2019, and from Milton Keynes City Council’s own submitted local plan.
What changed hands
The seller’s release records the estate as:
- 191,971 sq ft of floorspace across 29 units
- a 12.35-acre site, which is almost exactly 5 hectares
- let to 22 tenants
- an average weighted unexpired lease term of 2.3 years to break and 3.8 years to expiry
- in Wolverton, about four miles north of Milton Keynes city centre
The estate sits in Wolverton ward, in the parish of Wolverton and Greenleys, in the Milton Keynes North constituency.
The price, and what the seller paid for it
DTZ Investors bought the same estate seven and a half years ago. Its announcement of 20 February 2019 called it Canons Road Industrial Estate and put the figure at £18.09m, a net initial yield of 5.01%.
| February 2019 | September 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £18.09m | about £28m |
| Floorspace | 191,988 sq ft | 191,971 sq ft |
| Units | 29 | 29 |
| Tenants | 28, with one vacancy | 22 |
| Lease term to expiry | 4.9 years | 3.8 years |
| Lease term to break | 2.6 years | 2.3 years |
That is an increase of about £9.9m, or roughly 55%, over seven and a half years. On our own arithmetic the 2019 price came to about £94 a square foot. The seller puts the 2026 figure at about £147.
Jo Jackson, associate director at DTZ Investors, said in the release: “The sale crystalises a strong outcome for our client, having acquired the asset back in 2019. The sales campaign was well received by the investment market and attracted strong investor interest.”
The release does not name the client whose money owned the estate. It also does not say how many of the 29 units are empty. The tenant count has fallen from 28 to 22, but one tenant can hold more than one unit, so that figure is not a vacancy count.
Who has bought it
Chancerygate is a British industrial developer and asset manager. Since 30 July 2026 it has belonged to Dream, a Toronto company listed on the TSX. Its own announcement of that deal put Chancerygate’s assets under management at £1.2bn and its portfolio at 27 million square feet managed or under development, with more than 80 staff across nine countries.
Its published buying requirements set out what it looks for: “regional dominant multi-let industrial (MLI) and urban logistics assets in the £10m to £50m+ range”, bought with “a value-add strategy focused on brown-to-green strategy” and “access to short-term reversion”.
Short-term reversion means leases that run out soon. When they do, the owner can re-let at current rents rather than rents agreed years ago. An estate whose leases average 2.3 years to break is precisely that kind of asset.
Chancerygate is already building in Wolverton. Axis Park, on Blackhill Drive in the Wolverton Mill employment area, is a 200,000 sq ft scheme of eight units on a 10.6-acre site, built with CBRE Investment Management. Work started on 16 February 2026 with a projected gross development value of around £55m, and the first occupiers were expected during this quarter.
The two sites are less than a mile apart in a straight line. Both are in MK12.
Why industrial land in Milton Keynes is worth this
The council’s own MK City Plan 2050 explains the price better than the deal itself does.
The plan forecasts that Milton Keynes needs 433 hectares of land for offices, industry and warehousing between 2022 and 2050. Its own paragraph 38 says that figure “significantly exceeds the supply of employment land available at around 210 hectares”. Of the 433 hectares needed, 310 are for warehousing and logistics.
The plan adds a warning about what happens if the land is not there: “If suitable sites for warehousing development are not available in Milton Keynes, developers will seek to develop sites where suitable sites are available.”
Two further findings in the same chapter matter here:
- Replacing the city’s ageing commercial buildings needs more floorspace than economic growth does. The plan says the amount required to replace ageing stock “is greater than the amount of floorspace forecast to be required by economic growth”.
- Logistics employed 17,000 people in Milton Keynes in 2023, 9.1% of all jobs, against a Great Britain average of 5%.
Table 4 of the plan lists the whole employment land supply as 210.2 hectares. The Wolverton area accounts for 5.7 of those hectares: 2.6 at Wolverton, 1.9 at Blackhill and Harnett Drive, and 1.2 off Harnett Drive. The estate that has just been sold covers about 5 hectares on its own.
What it means for you
If you rent a unit on the estate. A change of owner does not change your lease. The points where a new owner acts are rent reviews, break dates and lease ends, and the seller’s own figure says the average lease on the estate has 2.3 years to run to its break.
If you were hoping it becomes housing. The submitted plan makes that hard. Policy ECP1, “Protecting employment land and buildings”, says proposals that would lose employment land “will be refused” unless the applicant produces robust evidence, including at least six months of marketing by a commercial agent, that there is “no longer a reasonable prospect” of employment use.
If you want to argue about that policy. The employment and retail policies are heard at the public examination of the plan on the morning of Wednesday 7 October at Margaret Powell House. We set out the full hearing timetable in our report on the MK City Plan 2050 examination.
If you are a small business looking for space. Policy GS3 gives explicit support to industrial and warehousing units of 465 to 929 square metres gross, which is about 5,000 to 10,000 sq ft. The 29 units on Canon Industrial Estate average around 6,600 sq ft. The plan records 11,050 micro-businesses in Milton Keynes in 2024, 89% of all businesses in the city.
You can follow applications affecting the site through our Milton Keynes planning news page.
What we could not confirm
- Chancerygate has issued no statement of its own, so there is no published account of what it intends to do with the estate.
- DTZ Investors does not name the client fund that owned it.
- Neither release names the 22 tenants, and we were not able to verify an occupier list from a first-party source, so we have not published one.
- Milton Keynes City Council does not release ratepayer names or empty property lists for business rates. Its Freedom of Information data sets page sets out the exemptions it relies on, citing tribunal decisions in Westminster City Council v Information Commissioner and Sheffield City Council v Information Commissioner.
- The Valuation Office Agency’s business rates search was returning a server error when we tried it on 21 September, so we could not publish rateable values for the units.
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