PFA Pension, Denmark’s largest insurer, has agreed to sell its residential portfolio for an undisclosed figure to a consortium of Danish real estate firm CenterPlan and Deutsche Bank’s RREEF.

The divested portfolio comprises 43 properties made up of 2,202 rental apartments in Denmark’s largest cities. Of these properties, six are on offer to tenants under Danish rent legislation.

The sale represents a shift for the insurance firm, which stopped developing residential in 1998 and announced in January that it was looking for a buyer.

PFA Spokesman Søren Esperson said: “It isn’t a complete shift but it is a change of focus. After watching rising property values over the past five—six years, we started to speculate about the price we would get if we sold.”

PFA will plough the sale’s proceeds into commercial real estate – “anywhere but especially in the UK”, said Esperson. “There just isn’t that much commercial property available in Denmark.”

RREEF said in a statement that the purchase reflected continuing strong fundamentals in the Danish market “and the specific potential of the purchased properties”.