Britain's best-known land family is leaving the US. Grosvenor Group has bought US real estate since the 1970s.
Now the firm is walking away. Grosvenor is owned by the 7th Duke of Westminster.
The firm plans to sell about $954 million of those US buildings.
The Grosvenor family has held land in central London since 1677. The firm now runs about $14 billion in land around the world.
The US slice is the piece they want to let go. Most of it sits in the Bay Area.
The rest is in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington DC. The firm will not dump all of it at once.
Agents will list the buildings one at a time. The sales will play out over the next few years.
The plan is to space out sales while the market is still soft.
The exit has been brewing for years. Grosvenor took a $60 million writedown on Bay Area homes in 2023.
A writedown is when a firm cuts the listed value of a building. It does that when the market price has dropped.
It locks in the loss on paper. The pandemic gutted local office demand.
Higher rates piled on more pain after that. Five Bay Area bosses have already left the firm.
The names are Angela Biggs, Jonathan Carr, Steve Buster, Jennifer Eskildsen, and Steve O'Connell. In Union Square, the firm sold a Stockton Street building this year.
That spot once housed Gucci. Grosvenor paid $80 million for it a decade ago.
The firm sold it for $44 million, just over half of what it paid. Other sales nearby include 251 Post Street and a Jackson Square retail building.
CEO James Raynor said the firm will keep US exposure by funding outside builders. It will stop buying or building things on its own.
Grosvenor is putting its real estate cash in two cities. Those cities are London and Vancouver.
Those are the markets where the firm thinks it has enough size to move the needle. "If we go to New York, we're a tiny player," Raynor told The Globe and Mail this year.
He pointed to Vancouver as a place where size means more. The firm has an 8-acre mixed-use site moving forward there.
Grosvenor has put cash in Vancouver since the 1950s. To free up cash for the new plan, the firm sold part of its Mayfair stake.
It also sold its last stake in Liverpool ONE, a UK mall. Both sales help fund the shift to London and Vancouver.
The firm now runs new US bets through Grosvenor Diversified Property Investments, called GDPI. GDPI started in 2012 and lends to outside builders.
Grosvenor is not the only foreign firm pulling back from US real estate. The list of sellers keeps growing as buildings trade at deep cuts to peak values.
The 7th Duke is just 35 years old. He goes by Hughie.
His net worth was put at 9.88 billion pounds on the Sunday Times Rich List for 2025. That ranked him 14th in the country.
The next round of Bay Area sales will set the tone for what other big foreign owners do next.
