Ivanhoé Cambridge has strengthened its presence in the Paris office market by partnering with ICAMAP to set up a vehicle aimed at developing €1.6bn worth low-carbon assets by 2028.
The C$60bn (€40.09bn) property investment arm of Quebec’s sovereign fund, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and ICAMAP have launched ICAWOOD and raised €750m of equity capital.
Ivanhoé Cambridge is the cornerstone investor in the fund. Other investors include 12 international institutions and family office investors.
The ICAWOOD fund, managed by ICAMAP, will have an overall investment capacity of €1.6bn and expects to develop between 200,000sqm to 300,000sqn of low-carbon offices.
The offices will implement building technologies developed by Woodeum Group’s subsidiary WO2.
The latest deal follows Ivanhoé Cambridge’s recent transactions in the French capital. The company acquired the 90,000sqm Saint-Denis office-building campus in November, in what was the single largest office sale in the French market in 2018. The month before, Ivanhoé Cambridge acquired a 9,000sqm office building under construction in Nanterre.
Karim Habra, the head of Europe at Ivanhoé Cambridge, said: “This fund reinforces our well-established capacity to invest in high-value-creation development projects in Europe’s large cities, and more specifically in the Greater Paris region, a strategic market for us.
”Woodeum has developed high-performance environmental and thermal technologies and construction processes, using cross-laminated timber; this constitutes a major advantage in building innovative office space that meets the needs of the most demanding users.”
Guillaume Poitrinal, the chairman of ICAMAP, and Philippe Zivkovic, chairman of WO2, both of whom are personal investors in the fund, said: “The partnership will foster the development of large low-carbon real estate complexes, which the dynamic companies in the Greater Paris region are actively seeking.”
