Tag: purchase

Grosvenor Buys its First Office Building in Spain

3 June 2019 – Expansión

The British real estate firm Grosvenor has made its debut in the office market in Spain with the acquisition of a building in the La Moraleja business park (Madrid) for an undisclosed sum. The property is located on Avenida de Europa, 19 and spans 22,000 m2.

Grosvenor returned to the Spanish real estate market in 2017 with the purchase of an 820 m2 plot of land on Calle Jorge Juan, 53 (Madrid) on which it is constructing a luxury residential development with views over the Retiro Park.

Since then it has been expanding its residential portfolio and is currently working on four projects in Madrid: La Esquina de General Arrando, Modesto Lafuente 26, García de Paredes 4 and Jorge Juan 53.

Original story: Expansión (by Rocío Ruiz)

Translation/Summary: Carmel Drake

Árima Makes its Logistics Debut with the Purchase of a Warehouse for €16.4M

7 May 2019 – Expansión

Árima Real Estate has made its debut in the logistics sector with the purchase of a warehouse spanning 26,000 m2 in San Agustín de Guadalix from an institutional fund for €16.4 million. The property is occupied in its entirety by the supermarket chain Eroski.

For the operation, the Socimi led by Luis Alfonso López Herrera-Oria, has been advised by Catella, EY Abogados and Savills Aguirre Newman as its real estate, legal and technical experts, respectively.

Following this operation, logistics assets account for 12.7% of Árima’s portfolio, with the remainder comprising offices in Madrid. The Socimi’s main shareholders include Bank of Montreal (10.4%); the British fund Pelham (9.984%); UBS (9.164%); Luis Alfonso López Herrera-Oria, (7.791%) and Morgan Stanley (5.122%).

Original story: Expansión (by Rebeca Arroyo)

Translation/Summary: Carmel Drake

Inveriplus Investments Acquires 4 Gyms to Operate Under its New ‘XXII Fit Club’ Brand

16 April 2019 – Palco23.com

The real estate consultancy firm Inveriplus Investments has purchased four sports centres in Madrid for an undisclosed sum. Specifically, it has acquired one gym in Chamberí (Calle Alberto Aguilera, 1) and one in Las Rosas shopping centre from Urban Fitness, as well as two others in Tres Cantos and Pozuelo from another vendor.

All four establishments will operate under the XXII Fit Club brand from September and the company plans to offer additional services to its clients, besides the standard fitness offering, including beauty, nutrition, personal training and physiotherapy.

Inveriplus intends to expand its portfolio to include twenty centres by the end of 2020, before growing beyond the Spanish capital to Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla, Málaga and Zaragoza.

Original story: Palco23.com (by P. López)

Translation/Summary: Carmel Drake

Impar Group Invests €20M in the Purchase of a Building on c/López de Hoyos

22 February 2019 – El Mundo

It has become one of the real estate groups that is revitalising the luxury residential real estate market in Madrid. Impar Group has identified its particular niche in the market with the renovation of classic buildings in the historical centre, as well as in the neighbourhoods of Chamberí and Salamanca, as “a way of restoring the urban heart”, said Roberto Perri, CEO of the group.

The company backed by Latin American capital has just added a new building to its portfolio of projects underway in Madrid, bringing the total to seven. It has purchased a building on Calle López de Hoyos, 171, with a buildable surface area of 9,000 m2, which will house between 60 and 70 homes, and which will have services such as a swimming pool and gym. The investment amounts to €20 million, plus the cost of the building work (…).

Original story: El Mundo (by M. J. G. Serranillos)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Dutch Firm Ten Brinke Buys 50,000 m2 in Ciempozuelos for New Retail Park

20 February 2019 – Eje Prime

New investment by Ten Brinke in Spain. The Dutch company dedicated to the development of residential properties and retail parks is going to build a new shopping complex in Ciempozuelos. The company has acquired a plot of land spanning 50,000 m2 and, over the next few weeks, it is going to begin work on the urbanisation of the future space. The new retail park will be a commercial hybrid with operators from the food, leisure and restaurant sectors, amongst others, although the company has not yet set a date for its future inauguration.

This project will join the one that the company is building in the Bahía de Cádiz with an investment of €20 million. There, Ten Brinke Desarrollos is building a new retail park on the Batería de la Ardila road, on the site of the former Tiro Janer industrial estate in the municipality of San Fernando. In that case, the property developer expects to finish the building work in 2020, and to open the complex the same year (…).

Ten Brinke Group is a Dutch multi-national with 115 years of experience in the development of residential properties and retail parks. It has been present in Spain for more than ten years and has offices in Madrid and Barcelona. The company also has offices in Germany, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Greece. On the global scale, it generates turnover of more than €950 million and has more than 950 employees, according to the latest data available on the company’s website (…).

Original story: Eje Prime (by Roger Arnau)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Amro Buys Sevillan Development in Iberian Roll-out

25 January 2019 – EGI

London-based investor Amro Real Estate Partners has bought a site in Sevilla, marking its second acquisition within its student housing platform in Spain and Portugal.

The deal forms part of the company’s strategy to create a 5,000-bed investment platform in the region.

Last year, Amro appointed CBRE to search for a student housing joint venture partner to undertake a €300m (£261m) capital investment in its Iberian expansion.

At the same time, it invested in a 360-bed student housing development site in Granada, which will launch in early 2020.

The site in Sevilla measures around 100,000 square metres (…).

Original story: EGI (by Pui-Guan Man)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

Apple Leisure Group Debuts in Spain with its Purchase of a Majority Stake in Alua Hotels

23 January 2019 – Revista 80 Días

The US group is one of the largest managers of accommodation in the Caribbean. This purchase allows it to enter the vacation segment and the European market.

Apple Leisure Group (ALG), one of the largest hotel investors in the USA, has acquired a majority stake in the share capital of Alua Hotels and Resorts, the hotel group founded in 2015 by its main executives and the private equity fund Alchemy Partners. The amount of the purchase has not been revealed, although the joint operating result of the chain’s main hotels amounted to €6 million in 2017. Given that the properties are located in areas with high tourist demand and good forecasts, the amount of the operation could have exceeded €40 million, based on the multiples that are typically used for this type of transaction.

With this acquisition, ALG is entering the European market through the sun and beach holiday segment. And it is doing so in a country such as Spain, which receives more than 80 million tourists per year in search of that kind of offer. Alua Hotels has 11 hotels located in Mallorca, Ibiza, Fuerteventura and Tenerife, together with an apartment building in Ibiza.

In total, ALG will manage more than 3,000 4-star hotel rooms, focused on the type of tourist who wants a superior service to that usually found in the average accommodation establishments in beach areas. The US company is planning to undertake more acquisitions in the European market and has announced that it wants to become a reference player in the main destinations in the Mediterranean (…).

Apple Leisure Group is one of the most important investment conglomerates in tourism in the USA. It used to be owned by the investment fund Bain Capital (…), which sold it in 2017 to the funds KSL Capital Partners and KKR for an undisclosed sum. (…). According to data from the conglomerate, it manages 14 brands and handles more than 3.2 million passengers per year (…). Its turnover exceeds USD 3 billion per year (…).

Original story: Revista 80 Días 

Translation: Carmel Drake

Apollo’s Sale of Altamira Enters the Home Stretch with DoBank & Intrum as Favourites

17 December 2018 – La Información

The market for servicers is still in a spin and, following the sale of the majority of Solvia last week, now it is Altamira’s turn. According to assurances provided to La Información by sources close to the process, the US fund Apollo is facing the home stretch of the operation, which is expected to close within the next few days. Of the offers received by the US entity, those submitted by the Italian entity DoBank and the Swedish firm Intrum, have managed to make it through to the final found.

In fact, according to the same sources, it is DoBank, the former UniCredit Management Bank, that has the upper hand, in a transaction that is being led by Goldman Sachs. Currently, the entity is the largest owner of doubtful loans in Italy, and so its experience with this type of company is more than clear. Moreover, the most recent major operation that it carried out was in Greece, with the acquisition of a portfolio of non-performing loans in the Hellenic country worth €2 billion.

In total, the Italian firm currently manages more than €77 billion in loans and has agreements with most entities in its home country. For that, it employs a workforce of almost 1,200 and works with 1,600 external collaborators.

Apollo engaged Goldman Sachs last summer to carry out the sale of its servicer but after months of offers – including from Haya and Cerberus – it has decided to select the aforementioned two entities for the final round. The US fund has decided to take advantage of the good times in the market to divest and obtain profits after four years at the helm of Altamira (…).

Apollo acquired the servicer in January 2014 after paying €664 million in exchange for the 85% stake that it currently owns. Its primary function is based on the recovery management of loans from banks and the management and sale of properties proceeding from that activity. In 2017, the last year for which data is available in the Mercantile Registry, Altamira had more than 500 employees and generated an annual turnover of more than €300 million.

This servicer has become one of the major managers of financial and real estate assets in the country, with more than €53.8 billion in assets and more than 82,000 properties. Its main clients include its shareholder Banco Santander, and Sareb (…).

Intrum has already purchased 80% of Solvia

In the event that the tables turn and it is Intrum that ends up acquiring Altamira, it would be the second operation by the Swedish firm in one week. On Friday, Sabadell announced the sale of 80% of Solvia Servicios Inmobiliarios to Intrum for €300 million, whereby converting the fund into one of the new property giants (…).

The sale of Altamira by Apollo would serve to further close the door to Spain for the Americans. Since the sale of Evo Banco in September – the fund’s other major project in the country – to Bankinter, speculation has been rife regarding Apollo’s withdrawal from the Spanish market (…).

Original story: La Información (by Lucía Gómez)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Eurofund Purchases a 140,000 m2 Plot in Lleida from Sareb

19 December 2018 – Eje Prime

Eurofund’s new macro-project in Lleida is taking shape. The group has completed the purchase from the Company for the Management of Assets proceeding from the Restructuring of the Banking System (Sareb) of 140,000 m2 of land in Torre Salses (Lleida). Eurofund’s plans involve investing €80 million to build a new shopping centre with a gross leasable area of 560,000 m2.

The purchase, carried out through Eurofund Parc Lleida, has been completed after Eurofund overcame Sareb’s processes, in particular, those relating to overseas investments. On 4 December, Eurofund Parc Lleida signed an urban planning management agreement with the Town Hall of the Catalan town to execute the widening and extension of Calle Víctor Torres and the modification of the urban planning order for the South 42 Torre Salses sector. The building work is scheduled to begin in the autumn of 2019, according to Eje Prime.

Grupo Eurofund

Eurofund currently owns more than €3.5 billion in commercial assets, including the centres that it has constructed and those that it has under development. The fund manager was founded in 1994 and its first major development was Parc Vallès, in Terrassa (Barcelona).

The company is the owner of complexes such as Puerto Venecia, in Zaragoza, and maintains an alliance with the British operator Intu for the construction of new shopping centres in Málaga, Valencia and Vigo. Over the last 18 months, Eurofund Capital Partners has co-invested almost €350 million in real estate operations in Spain.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation: Carmel Drake

The Reuben Brothers Win the Bid for Santander’s Ciudad Financiera

12 November 2018 – El Confidencial

Banco Santander’s Ciudad Financiera has a new owner. The Reuben brothers have won the bid to acquire the headquarters of the Spanish bank, whose former owner, Marme Inversiones, filed for creditors’ bankruptcy. The Asian investors, who are residents in London and lovers of Ibiza, submitted the highest bid for the land in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), fighting off competition from the bank itself chaired by Ana Botín and from the Arab fund AGC Equity Partners.

That is the result of the bid after the envelopes containing the final offers from the three candidates were opened by the bankruptcy administrator. Although the final price is not known, the offers amounted to around €3 billion, according to sources close to the operation, one of the largest operations ever in the real estate market in Spain involving a single asset.

From now on, to validate the purchase by the Reuben brothers, the judge from the mercantile court who is conducting the sale will have to certify that the offer from the London-based millionaires is correct, fulfils all of the requirements and complies with all of the analysis regarding transparency and money laundering. Nevertheless, and even if the judge gives his blessing, Banco Santander may exercise its right of first refusal, which gives it the last word for recovering the headquarters, which it sold in 2008 to a group of investors, who were also British, and with whom it agreed to remain as the tenant for forty years.

For that, the €500 million that Santander has paid Marme by way of rental over the last ten years has to be deducted from the final price, as does the €300 million of intra-group debt that is no longer taken into consideration following the entry into bankruptcy of the company.

Movements in the courts

Because what the Reuben brothers are now buying is the asset of a company that, after borrowing funds to pay even the tax on the original acquisition in 2008, can no longer keep up repayments on the loan it requested to acquire Ciudad Financiera and so filed for bankruptcy. After a long bankruptcy administration process, numerous claims by the creditors in the courts and offers from several international sovereign funds, the Spanish entity wanted to acquire the land of its headquarters in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), where almost 7,000 people work.

The creditors of Marme Inversiones 2007 include ING, HSH Nordbank, CaixaBank and Bayeriche Landesbank, which granted a loan amounting to €1.575 billion to Propinvest ten years ago in the form of a leaseback arrangement with Santander’s largest real estate asset. Other entities also participated in that loan, including Deutsche Postbank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Raffeisen Zentralbank, which started to sell their stakes in the loan to vulture funds in 2011, with significant discounts on the nominal values, when the owner started to acknowledge that it was unable to make the debt repayments.

One of those who purchased that debt was Blackstone, together with other similar funds, such as Centerbridge and Avenue Capital. The first two submitted an offer to acquire Ciudad Financiera on 17 September, but their proposal was lower than those offers by Santander (…).

The Reuben brothers, which have purchased almost 168 hectares of land in Ibiza over the last two years, have submitted their bid for the Ciudad Financiera through Ibiza Properties LTD. That company was constituted on 1 August, with a nominal value of just GBP 100, money that it will now have to increase to cover the payment to the bankruptcy administrator.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Agustín Marcos)

Translation: Carmel Drake