Nuveen Real Estate’s pan-European diversified value-add strategy has acquired a single-family housing estate in Finland in a €42m forward-purchase deal.
Nuveen said the acquisition of the 141-unit housing property in the Helsinki metropolitan area takes the strategy to over 25% of capital deployed.
The European Value Add strategy – which counts Danish pension fund Sampension as an investor – has a cross-sector outlook and will continue to source opportunities across the UK and Europe, focusing on urban logistics, housing and alternatives.
The manager said the value-add strategy currently has around €350m of dry powder, following an additional closing in March this year.
Nuveen will partner with Toivo Group to deliver affordable and energy-efficient homes which will be constructed using timber frames and integrating ground source heat pumps.
It added that alongside Toivo and local operating partner Trevian, it plans to build additional single-family estates in the region.
David Pearce, fund manager for real estate in Europe at Nuveen, said: “We adopted a patient capital deployment strategy in 2023 with valuations in some sectors and markets taking longer to filter through.
“Following the extension of our fundraising period to the end of 2024, the team is well positioned to take advantage of the repricing across Europe and seek attractive risk-adjusted returns in our target sectors, which can offer substantial scalability potential.”
Oscar Maltesen, director at Nuveen Real Estate, said: “As a broader real estate platform, single-family rental is one of our key sector convictions, with the Nordics demonstrating particularly favourable underlying fundamentals and a highly dynamic rental market.
“We continue to see robust demand for well-located homes with leading sustainability credentials in submarkets, such as Helsinki, where supply remains extremely constrained for single-family rentals.”
Maltesen added that Nuveen already has several single-family investments in the progressed submarkets of Copenhagen, but Helsinki remains a less mature market, “where we are actively seeking opportunities to grow our portfolio across several mandates”.
To read the latest IPE Real Assets magazine click here.
