GERMANY – German institutional investors continue to target Austrian real estate after making up a third of transactions in the country last year.
Invesco Real Estate, investing on behalf of German pension fund Nordrheinische Ärzteversorgung (NAEV), acquired three retail parks in the west of Austria for €19.9m
Warburg-Henderson, meanwhile, has made the seventh purchase for its Austria-focused real estate fund, acquiring the retail park M-City in Mistelbach, in the east of the country.
The deals suggest an ongoing appetite among German institutions for real estate assets in the neighbouring country. A report from CBRE suggested that approximately one-third of deals in Austria in 2012 were made by German investors.
The three retail parks in western Ausria will be integrated into a pan-European mandate managed for NAEV by Invesco Real Estate.
All three centres are fully let “over the long-term”, according to Invesco Real Estate, and face no new competition in the immediate future.
M-City was acquired for an undisclosed sum from Bank Austria Real Invest and will form part of Warburg-Henderson’s Österreich Fonds Nr. 2 launched in March 2011.
In other news, SEB Asset Management sold three properties in Berlin, for a total of €300m, from its open-ended SEB ImmoInvest, which had to be frozen in the wake of the financial crisis and is now being dissolved.
Two hotels, the Grand Hyatt and the Maritim Hotel in the Tiergarten district, were “transferred to a subsidiary of the Al Faisal Holding”, SEB stated.
The third property, an office building in Berlin-Mitte, was sold to “a real estate fund provider in Berlin”.
