Blue Sky Group, representing several pension funds, has bought into the CBRE Dutch Office Fund on the secondary market.

The Dutch investor has acquired a “significant stake” after plans were made for fund manager CBRE Global Investors to sell non-core assets in the fund.

According to Peter Bretveld, senior fund manager for global real estate at Blue Sky, the office fund is being split into a “strategic portfolio” and a “non-strategic portfolio” with assets in the latter to sold in the future.

Bretveld told IP Real Estate: “We have negotiated an attractive price to mitigate the downside risk on that specific portion of the portfolio.”

He said it was an opportunity to gain further exposure to Dutch offices at a time when parts of the market were bottoming out.

The structure, terms and conditions of the €1.56bn fund – which has approximately 59 assets including office complex World Trade Center Amsterdam – are also being “modernised” to “improve liquidity”, according to CBRE Global Investors.

Pension funds represented by Blue Sky in the deal included Stichting Pensioenfonds KLM-Cabinepersoneel, Stichting Algemeen Pensioenfonds Vliegend Personeel KLM, Stichting Pensioenfonds Blue Sky Group and Stichting TOTAL Pensioenfonds Nederland.

Bretveld said he expected to see more “interesting opportunities” to invest in real estate via the secondary market. He cited Europe as having the most potential for ‘secondaries’ investments after opportunities in Asia had begun to dwindle.

“In Europe we haven’t seen that many reasonably priced secondarie so fars,” he said. “However, I think that will change in the coming years, since quite a few of the European funds are expiring.”

He expected, for example, to see closed-ended funds close to expiry being restructured into open-ended vehicles to prolong their activities.

 

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