Tag: Aktua

Ibercaja Outsources Its RE Management To Aktua

3 February 2016 – Expansión

Yesterday, the Aragonese group Ibercaja signed an agreement to outsource the management of its real estate assets to Aktua.

The platform, which is owned by the US fund Centerbridge, has itself been up for sale since the end of 2015. Altamira is one of the favourites in the running to acquire it.

The operation signed by Ibercaja is the first of its kind in the Spanish banking sector since 2013, when the large entities, such as Santander, CaixaBank, Bankia and Popular all sold their real estate platforms under management contracts lasting around ten years.

Those operations allowed the Spanish banks to raise capital in exchange for ceding future commissions, and transferring the administration and sale of their assets to specialist firms. Those deals allowed them to focus on their strategic business, namely: to grant loans and take deposits.

“This operation, which is going to have a positive impact on the income statement of Ibercaja Banco, aims to establish a stable partnership with a prestigious industrial partner, to strengthen the entity’s strategy of boosting the sale of its real estate assets through the retail channel and simplifying and optimising its structure in the real estate sector”, said Ibercaja in a statement.

With this operation, the financial group takes a step closer towards its future debut on the stock market in the medium term. This comes after the sale of the majority if its bad real estate loans to Oaktree last year.

Ibercaja has been advised in this process by N+1 and Baker & McKenzie, and Aktua has been advised by KPMG, as its financial and legal advisor.

Original story: Expansión (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Deutsche Bank Injects €150M Into Aktua Ahead Of Its Sale

17 November 2015 – Expansión

Aktua is up for sale. Banesto’s former real estate arm was acquired by the US fund Centerbridge in 2012, at the height of the financial crisis.

Now, more than three years later, it is time to capitalise on that operation in an economic scenario that is very different from the one seen in 2012; but before completing the transfer, Centerbridge has been “adorning” Aktua so that the operation closes in the best possible way for the firm. In this way, it has undertaken a comprehensive reorganisation of the company’s financial structure.

To achieve this, Centerbridge has not resorted to traditional channels. It was not averse to that option and in fact, it was there that it took its first steps, but the offer of a direct loan then crossed its path. “Aktua received financing offers from several commercial banks, but then one entity offered it a different structure, which was interesting as it allowed more leverage”, says a financial source.

That entity was Deutsche Bank, but not the bank’s commercial banking division, rather its direct lending team. And that offer changed the plans for Aktua. Centerbridge accepted the offer and the result has been an injection of €150 million in funding, which has been used to refinance the company’s debt and also to enable the owner to recover some of the investment it made in 2012, and to pay a dividend, according to several market sources.

In this way, the money that Centerbridge receives from the sale of Aktua will not be the only return it generates from the operation.

Sharing the risk

The direct loan was structured in two tranches, one amounting to €100 million and the other amounting €50 million, both with a 7-year term, something that is not that easy to find amongst the traditional banks. The first loan was signed between Deutsche Bank and Aktua at the end of May, but that was just the beginning – since then, the financing structure has been evolving. With the money now in the coffers of the recipients, Deutsche Bank has gone one step further and has decided to retain title over the entire second loan tranche, but to syndicate out the first €100 million tranche and whereby share the risk with other entities. Santander, Sabadell and Bankinter all responded to the call and so now the financing is shared between those four entities.

All of them will receive 300 basis points above 3-month Euribor for the €100 million first loan tranche. The €50 million tranche that Deutsche continues to hold has different costs and conditions associated with it.

This operation represents the launch of Deutsche Bank’s direct lending business in Spain. And the debut has been conducted in style: the €150 million injection makes the loan to Aktua the first in the list of the largest transactions performed by the banks so far in 2015.

Meanwhile, Centerbridge is now handling the second phase of the operation, namely: the sale of Aktua. It has engaged the investment banks Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to coordinate the sale, alongside the law firm Linklaters. According to Reuters, Aktua is worth around €300 million and its sale has sparked interest amongst several international venture capital funds, including the British fund Permira.

Original story: Expansión (by Inés Abril)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Centerbridge Could Raise €200M-€300M From Sale Of Aktua

6 November 2015 – Expansión

The consolidation has begun of the banks’ former real estate companies, also known as servicers. The US fund Centerbridge has put its subsidiary Aktua up for sale, which it acquired from Banesto in 2012. The operation – known as Project Pegasus – has been entrusted to the investment banks Barclays and Bank of America, and to the law firm Linklaters, and has been valued at between €200 million and €300 million, according to various sources.

Aktua currently employs around 400 people and manages real estate assets worth €6,000 million. Alongside the assets that originated from Banesto – whose management it maintained following that entity’s integration with Santander – Centerbridge also manages properties and debt from BMN and several recovery contracts for other entities.

Centerbridge’s withdrawal from the market was first triggered when Aktua lost the contract it had held with Sareb, following that entity’s tender to select new managers in 2014. Since then, those assets have been managed by Altamira, owned by Apollo and Santander, which seems to be the likely candidate to take over Aktua.

Sources in the sector do not rule out the possibility that Aktua will end up in the hands of one of the other servicers that are part-owned by funds operating in Spain, such as Altamira; Aliseda, owned by Värde, Kennedy Wilson and Popular; Haya Real Estate, owned by Cerberus; Servihabitat, owned by TPG and CaixaBank; and Anticipa, owned by Blackstone. They have also not ruled out the possibility that Solvia, owned by Sabadell, will enter the process, since it was awarded one of the Sareb contracts.

With these kinds of operations, international funds are looking to obtain scale and efficiency in order to make their platforms more profitable. These investors spent almost €2,300 million buying servicers from the banks.

According to Reuters, new funds, interested in entering the sector for the first time, may also join the bidding, such as the private equity firm Permira.

In addition to these possible mergers, experts in the sector also expect that some of the entities that have not outsourced the management of their assets may do so. In fact, Ibercaja is progressing with Project Kite, which includes 6,900 residential units, 1,300 commercial premises and industrial warehouses and 600 plots of land, worth €800 million, and a team of professionals specialising in the segment, comprising around 50 employees.

Centerbridge’s exit from this business comes at a time when other opportunistic funds are also leaving the market, such as Elliott, which recently sold its recovery management platform to Cabot; and Fortress, which has put two of its main businesses in Spain up for sale: the financing company Lico Leasing and the loan management platform Paratus.

Original story: Expansión (by J. Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Centerbridge To Sell Property Services Firm Aktua

30 October 2015 – Reuters

U.S. private equity group Centerbridge Partners has appointed investment banks to sell Spanish property services firm Aktua, five sources familiar with the matter said.

Centerbridge is seeking to take advantage of an improvement in the Spanish property market where valuations of real estate assets are recovering after taking a hit during Spain’s economic downturn.

The New York-based fund has hired Bank of America and Barclays to launch a sales process for the company which offers a wide range of real estate services including property maintenance, rental collection and loan management, the sources said. Bank of America and Barclays declined to comment while Centerbridge had no immediate comment.

Aktua is expected to have core earnings of between €40 million and €50 million this year and could be valued at around €300 million ($329 million), or 7 to 7.5 times its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), two of the sources said.

The company, which employs more than 400 people in Spain, has already drawn interest from a series of international buyout funds including London-based Permira, another source said.

Permira, which is in the process of selling two of its Spanish portfolio companies, Cortefiel and Telepizza, declined to comment.

The sale of Aktua has yet to start but bidders are already lining up to examine the asset and its growth potential, the sources said.

Real Estate Rebound

Aktua has roughly €5 billion of assets under management of which €2.4 billion are real estate assets and the rest loans.

Based in Madrid, it makes an attractive consolidation platform for private equity firms which could adopt a so-called buy and build strategy and combine it with other Spanish property management firms, the sources said.

This would generate a flurry of deals giving U.S. investors, which swooped on low-priced Spanish real estate assets during the financial crisis, an opportunity to capitalise on Spain’s economic rebound.

Real estate prices dropped by more than 35 percent in Spain between 2007 and 2014, according to the National Statistics Institute.

Centerbridge broke into the Spanish market in 2012. It paid €100 million to buy Aktua from Spanish bank Banco Español de Credito (Banesto).

Other U.S. investment firms could go down the same route and divest property firms they’ve held for the past three years, one of the sources said.

In 2013, New York-based buyout firm Apollo bought 85% of Santander’s property management unit Altamira for €664 million.

Another Spanish bank, La Caixa, sold 51% of its real estate services arm, Servihabitat Gestión Inmobiliaria, for €185 million in 2013.

Original story: Reuters (by Pamela Barbaglia and Andrés González)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

BMN Sells Part Of Its Recovery Business To Lindorff

6 October 2015 – Expansión

BMN is completing the sale and outsourcing of its recovery business in an agreement with Lindorff. The entity, led by Carlos Egea, has awarded the management of its late-stage non-performing debt portfolio (balances that have been overdue for more than 120 days) to the Norwegian financial group, according to financial sources consulted by Expansión.

According to the same sources, Lindorff has paid around €20 million for the contract to manage this debt for ten years.

It is the second such contract that BMN has awarded to Lindorff. The Norwegian group has been managing BMN’s early-stage non-performing debt portfolio (balances that have been overdue for up to 120 days) since the beginning of 2014; it paid €36 million for this contract.

The nationalised group also did the same thing with its own firm Inmare, dedicated to the management of foreclosed assets and real estate debt; it sold the company to Aktua (owned by Centerbridge) for almost €50 million.

In total, BMN has obtained just over €100 million from these kinds of operations in recent years. These types of sale allow the entity to generate capital gains, which it uses to strengthen its capital base. Although the funds, in this case Lindorff, pay the capital upfront, they recover it subsequently through commissions based on objectives.

Specialisation

One of the other reasons behind such deals, which would have carried less weight in this transaction, is the outsourcing of a service in which banks are not experts and whose results improve when it is delegated to specialist firms such as Lindorff.

The operation has been advised by Montalbán Atlas Capital, a firm that has coordinated similar transactions in the past, such as the one closed by Popular, which sold its recovery business EOS for €135 million; and Sabadell, which sold its business to Lindorff, for €162 million.

In addition to the sale by BMN, Ibercaja has launched the transfer of its real estate management division, together with all of its foreclosed assets, in an operation known as Project Kite.

Original story: Expansión (by J. Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Aktua To Manage Assets Of Greek Alpha Bank

26/12/2014 – Expansión

Greece’s Alpha Bank and Spain’s Aktua Financial Solutions have struck up an agreement to establish a joint venture dedicated to managing “a significant amount” of risk assets of the Greek bank, called Aktua Hellas, in which the Spanish institution will control 55% and the Greek institution, the remaining 45%.

Under the agreement, which is subject to the approval of regulatory authorities and definitive documentation, Aktua Hellas stems from a long-term partnership for the exclusive management of a large volume of (non-performing) toxic assets of Alpha Bank.

Aktua Hellas will be a pioneering platform in the Greek market, specializing in the management of risk assets with the aim of speeding up amicable resolutions as well as mutually agreeable and non-judicial solutions.

“It is an important step forward for the continued recovery of the Greek economy and financial system,” said Demetrios Mantzounis, President of Alpha Bank.

Original article: Expansión

Translation: Aura REE

Centerbridge Hires Executives of NCG & Bankia

14/04/2014 – Expansion

U.S. fund Centerbridge (…) that now manages Aktua (formerly belonging to Banesto), has employed two ex-executives: Francisco Zamorano from NCG Banco and Luis Noguerol from Bankia. Prior to joining the U.S. fund team, the first worked as director for transactions concerning real estate assets and credits, while the other as risk control director.

(…) Earlier, Centerbridge hired Javier Fernández Espejel and Yolanda Berenguer. The four new executives shall be added to 60 workers employed throughout 2013 and 40 employees more that will join the team together with BMN´s property servicer firm acquired by the fund for €50 million. Altogether, about 300 people are to work for Centerbridge in Spain.

The U.S. fund also seeks credit portfolios on sale and other real estate managing platforms. (…).

 

 

Original article: Expansión (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: AURA REE