REAL ESTATE – Moor Park, a London-based real estate fund provider, has paid €863m to acquire 72 hotels in Germany and 19 in the Netherlands from French hotel chain Accor.
Under the deal, Accor will rent the hotels, which fall under the Novotel, Mercure, Ibis and Etap brand names, back from Moor Park for a period of 12 years.
Though the figure can vary, Accor’s rent is to equal around 18% of the annual revenues generated from the hotels. The hotels have 12,000 rooms between them.
For its part, Moor Park will invest €43m in the hotels and include them in its ‘Real Estate Fund I’. Last year, the firm acquired more than 70 Praktiker home improvement outlets in Germany for the fund.
In other deal news, Commerz Grundbesitz (CGB), a German provider of open-ended real estate funds, said it had acquired a new property near Paris for €260m.
The seller of the property was the real estate arm of French telecoms firm Bouygues and CGB said Bouygues would rent the property back from it for nine years.
As a result of the deal, CGB said it currently owned more than €2.5bn worth of real estate in and around Paris. The real estate fund provider added that in the near term, it would raise the value of its French holdings to more than €3bn. CGB has been active in the French market since 1997.
Separately, German real estate firm IVG Immobilien said it had invested €109m in two new offices buildings in Glasgow. Construction of the buildings is set to begin this November and by completed by April 2010.
IVG, Germany’s largest listed real estate firm, said the move was motivated by its wish to diversify its UK investments away from London and southeast England.
