AXA Investment Managers – Real Assets has acquired a €545m portfolio of 11 hotels in Europe from a Principal Real Estate Europe’s first hotel real estate fund.

Principal Hotel Immobilien Spezial Fonds has agreed to sell its remaining portfolio of city centre hotel portfolio of over 2,300 rooms.

Seven of the hotels are in Germany, with the remaining located in other cities like Vienna.

Principal said the latest transaction will conclude the disposal of the entire portfolio of the core-plus fund which first closed in 2012, acquired 16 hotels until 2016.

Jochen Schafer-Suren CEO of Principal’s hotel and leisure division said: “At Principal we are proud of the results of our first-ever hotel fund product which with this transaction will come to its successful conclusion as we will unwind the fund in early 2020 and return capital and profits to our institutional investors.”

Schafer-Suren said the company will focus on investing over €400m of capital available for new hotel investments of “our existing second hotel fund focused on value-add hotel investments across Europe”.

“Furthermore, we will leverage our expertise in hotel real estate which attracts more and more investors due to its attractive long-term income generation by developing new well-designed hotel real estate investment strategies in Europe and the US as markets mature and evolve to serve investors in delivering attractive returns with institutional type-high quality hotel assets and risk-return profiles.”