GERMANY – The €55bn Bayerische Versorgungskammer (BVK) has widened its debt investments by taking over the €300m refinancing of an office tower in Frankfurt from Austria's CA Immo.

At the same time, CA Immo sold a two-thirds share of the office building, worth around €500m, in equal parts to two unnamed German institutional investors – a Versorgungswerk and a pension fund.

The BVK said the refinancing contract was another step in the process of "widening its credit business" via its six-member, in-house competence team.

Only last week, it announced a unique joint venture with the Deutsche Hypobank on co-financing loans for commercial properties.

Tower 185, among the four largest office buildings in Germany, was completed in 2011 by CA Immo, which has been running the property so far.

In other news, Commerz Real, a subsidiary of Commerzbank, has announced a restructuring of its institutional business.

The company said it was "reviewing various new investment solutions" for its clients and "planning to widen the offered asset classes".

New strategies will focus on "immediate investments in readily available real assets with a stable cash flow".

The company is looking at infrastructure (including grid operations), real estate, renewable energy facilities, railway wagon funds, airplanes and ships.

Those asset classes – formerly limited almost solely to closed-end fund structures – have been given more transparency and a clearer structure by the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch (KAGB), with which the German government has implemented the AIFM Directive.

Commerz Real said the changes in strategy were necessary in a "highly complex regulatory environment" and due to "changes in the needs of institutional investors".

Lastly, IVG real estate company has announced it will be shutting down its closed-end fund business for private investors, IVG Private Funds.

In a statement, it said: "The decision is attributable to a decline in demand for closed-end real estate funds among investors and changed legal and sales structures, resulting in a lack of long-term profitability of this division."

It added IVG Private Funds Management was "not affected by this decision".

Over the summer, IVG was granted permission to self-administer its insolvency.

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