Atlético de Madrid Expects to Close the Sale of the Calderón Plots in Early 2019

20 November 2018 – Eje Prime

Atlético de Madrid is proof of the importance that property can have when it comes to financing activity. The football club has decided to take out a mortgage backed by the Wanda Metropolitano stadium to secure its €200 million refinancing with Inbursa, the financial entity controlled by Carlos Slim, according to reports from Palco 23. The intention of the Board of Directors is to convert that debt into a long-term liability and obtain better conditions than those signed when the financing plan for the new stadium was modified. In parallel, the club is preparing the sale of the plots of land on the site of the Vicente Calderón, scheduled for the beginning of 2019.

The €200 million refinancing plan and the sale of the plots alongside the Manzanares River are closely linked. Two years ago, the Mexican bank offered the financing necessary to finish the building work at the Wanda Metropolitano, after FCC, the construction group that it also controls, refused to charge for its service through the delivery of units for urban development at the Vicente Calderón.

The contract allowed the parties to cancel the loan with the sale of the plot or with the payment of annual instalments for four seasons, which made the repayment of the loan very short term, in the middle of the expansion of the sports area. In the end, the club has committed to extend the term and so the liquidity injection that will result from the sale of the Calderón will not be used to repay the debt, but rather to make more resources available for the club’s daily operations, as well as for new projects and to access to the transfer market,  if necessary.

Sources at the club indicate that the second real estate operation will probably not be signed until next year, after the municipal government of Madrid failed to provide its definitive approval of the urban planning project until last week. “We think that the uses will be converted into plots and registered in the name of the club at the beginning of 2019, which is when we will proceed with the sale”, they said.

Obtaining all of the permits is the guarantee that the property developers will be able to undertake their projects without any problems. The definitive plan establishes 33,339 m2 for residential use, with a buildability of 132,344 m2; of that capacity, 13,234 m2 in total will be reserved for social housing properties. Tertiary use land will span 14,705 m2, with 13,893 m2 for public amenities and just over 73,000 m2 for green space and others.

The new owners will have to assume the urbanisation costs of €42.22 million, including the €22 million required for the demolition of the former Atléti stadium, without affecting the M-30 road, which passes under one of the stands. It is unknown whether the football club and the Mahou brewery or the future owners will assume that price, and what impact that will have on the final sales price (…).

Original story: Eje Prime (by M. Menchen)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Aelca, Ibosa, Amenabar, Pryconsa, Libra & Princeton Compete For Calderón Plots

18 November 2017 – El Economista

Atlético de Madrid has already received its first offers from investors interested in acquiring the plots of land adjacent to the Vicente Calderón stadium. The sale represents the largest land operation currently underway in the centre of Madrid and the football club is taking advantage of that fact to try to find a buyer willing to pay double the current prices in the area.

According to several sources in the sector, the companies that have bid to acquire these plots of land include the property developer Aelca, in which Värde holds a stake. It is the only one of the four large real estate companies still in the process, given that Neinor, Aedas and Vía Célere have all ruled out participating in the operation, due to its high price.

The same sources state that Grupo Ibosa is another one of the firms that is pushing ahead with the purchase process; and it is doing so with the backing of a fund. Similarly, the property developers Amenabar and Pryconsa have also submitted bids, as has the cooperative manager Libra Gestión.

The British family office Princeton is another name that appears on the list of investors interested in the Calderdón. That firm arrived in Spain at the beginning of 2015 and since then has closed several residential operations as well as a handful of others of a tertiary nature.

CBRE, which is advising the operation, will receive the binding offers at the end of November, with the aim of trying to close the sale before the end of the year. Atlético de Madrid wants to repay Carlos Slim on time for the more than €160 million that he loaned the Club, through the company Inbursa, to finance the works on the new stadium, Wanda Metropolitano.

The land up for sale is divided into three plots (RC-4, RC-7 and RC-8) and together cover more than 63,000 m2. The largest space corresponds to private residential use and the rest to tertiary use. The amount that Atlético de Madrid expects to receive for this operation, according to real estate sources in the know, comes to €200 million, which places the price per square metre in a very high range, of around €3,300/m2. In this way, the c. 480 homes that will be constructed on the site, will have to be sold for around €6,000/m2 if the operation is to be profitable for the buyer. It is precisely these figures that have deterred the large listed real estate companies, as well as those that have financial backing from funds, given that they must fulfil the returns they have promised to their shareholders and investors in every operation.

First obstacles

Although the project known as Mahou-Calderón, which encompasses the sale of these plots, has already received provisional approval from the Town Hall of Madrid, it is still awaiting definitive approval from the Community of Madrid’s Urban Planning Committee, which has four months to analyse the one-off amendment to the PGOU, and the Community of Madrid’s Governing Council, according to José Manuel Calvo, a Councillor for the Town Hall of Madrid, in an interview for the El Economista’s Inmobiliaria magazine.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, it was revealed that the Ministry for the Environment and Land Planning had identified a “calculation error” in the buildability coefficients, and has urged the municipal technicians to correct the errors in order “to prevent the operation from being susceptible to being challenged in the courts in the future”, said sources from the Ministry to EP.

Original story: El Economista (by Alba Brualla)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Atlético De Madrid Wants To Sell Operación Calderón Land For €3,300/m2

10 November 2017 – Cinco Días

Atlético de Madrid is looking to shake up the real estate sector with a record-breaking operation. The club is heating up the housing market with an operation to sell the plots on the site of its former Vicente Calderón stadium, through which it wants to achieve much higher prices than are currently being paid for land in the surrounding area.

The club, chaired by Enrique Cerezo and controlled by Miguel Ángel Gil, has engaged the consultancy firm CBRE to sell the plots of land, and the first round of offers have already been received. Atlético has already been sounding out potential buyers regarding a land asking price of €3,300/m2, according to four companies in the real estate sector, which would represent a record in this part of the Spanish capital.

That high land value would mean that the houses built on the site would have to be sold for approximately €6,000/m2, according to the calculations performed by several sources. That figure is equivalent to other more expensive areas in the capital and represents almost twice the current sales price of new build homes in the district of Arganzuela, where the stadium is located. According to the appraisal company Tinsa, new homes in this neighbourhood are currently being sold for prices ranging between €3,000/m2 and €4,000/m2, based on data as at 2017.

Specifically, Atlético is selling three plots of land, which have a total surface area of 63,076 m2, of which 57,094 m2 corresponds to residential use and the remaining 5,892 m2 to commercial use. Around 500 homes are expected to be built on the site. If the club manages to find a buyer willing to pay €3,300/m2, it will receive proceeds of €210 million. If the price ends up being €3,000/m2, the purchaser will have to spend around €190 million.

This urban planning operation is linked to the club’s change of stadium after it moved this season from its former pitch next to the Manzanares River to the new Wanda Metropolitan (…). Moreover, the football team needs to sell these plots to repay Inbursa – owned by the magnate Carlos Slim – for a €160 million loan that it was granted to build its new stadium.

The so-called Operación Mahou-Calderón, which also includes the adjacent plots on the site of the former brewery headquarters- but which are not included in the sale now being undertaken by Atlético – was approved by the municipal plenary in September. The buildability of that environment has decreased from 175,000 m2 to 147,000 m2 with respect to Ana Botella’s plan dated 2014.

Sources in the sector explain that CBRE has already received at least five offers during the first phase of the process, which is expected to close at the beginning of 2018. For the time being, it is not known whether any of these bids exceeds the figure of €3,000/m2 that Atleti is looking for (…).

Sources at the real estate consultancy firm Knight Frank calculate that the price of land in this neighbourhood amounts to a maximum of between €2,400/m2 and €2,800/m2. They explain that recent similar purchases in the district of Arganzuela, in the Méndez Álvaro area, for example, were closed for a price of between €2,000/m2 and €2,220/m2.

However, some experts in the residential market do believe that the €3,000/m2 threshold may be broken due to the high purchase pressure currently in play, primarily due to interest from international funds. They also consider that these plots are very attractive, located as they are in the Madrid Río area, and so they expect the degree of interest in them to be high.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, in the Usera area, Neinor Homes is marketing quite an exclusive development called Riverside at prices that exceed €4,000/m2, according to the portal Fotocasa, and the penthouses are going for €6,000/m2.

Original story: Cinco Días (by Alfonso Simón Ruiz)

Translation: Carmel Drake