French fund managers Amundi and L'Etoile Properties are in exclusive talks to acquire the Atrium office complex in Amsterdam for around €500 mln, Europroperty has reported.
The seller is Icon Real Estate, a vehicle established by private equity firm Victory Advisors to hold and manage its Benelux portfolio of office assets.
Icon/Victory Advisors, Amundi and L'Etoile Proprties declined to comment on the Europroperty report. But if the deal gets across the line it will be a record on two counts in the Dutch market.
In the first instance the reported price of €500 mln would make this the largest single real estate asset deal ever in the Netherlands in a year when Amundi and L'Etoile already established the previous record. In May the pair acquired the First Rotterdam office tower in Rotterdam for €350 mln in what was then the biggest single-asset deal.
The Rotterdam deal, PropertyEU reported at the time, was carried out by Amundi and LÉtoile on behalf of the Korean Federation of Community Credit Cooperatives (KFCC) and Meritz Securities. Europroperty reports the Atrium deal will also be syndicated to South Korean investors.
The full story appears in the January edition of Europroperty
Secondly, an investment volume of €500 mln would entail a huge premium as Victory Advisors acquired the outdated 34,000 m2 Atrium for about €100 mln from Ireland's Avestus (formerly known as Quinlan Private) at the trough of the Dutch real estate downturn in 2013. Quinlan Private had in turn purchased the complex from Tishman Speyer for €200 mln in 2007 when the market was in better shape.
The Atrium is located next to the World Trade Center in the South Axis (Zuidas) business district of Amsterdam. With the addition of a north and a south tower in 2017, the complex, dating from 1979, will expand from about 30,000 m2 to 56,500 m2 with 500 parking places in an area where parking is at a premium.
Deal of the Decade Awards
Victory Advisors was founded by Erik Moresco, a former managing director at Blackstone, in 2009. The firm has submitted the Atrium to PropertyEU's Deal of the Decade Awards that take place in early 2017.
In its submission Victory Advisors writes: 'The Atrium was not the “largest transaction ever”, nor is it the “tallest tower” or the “most luxurious” hotel or shopping centre. It is, however, a true landmark icon and a truly fascinating transaction that has incorporated almost every possible aspect or challenge that a real estate investment could have.
'Acquired during one of the darkest periods of the worst economic crisis in modern history, riddled with technical problems and a mutinous tenant base that was leaving in droves. Facing a State-sponsored expropriation of one of its most important operational assets (the parking area) and believed in the market to be outdated and unable to compete with modern products, the Atrium was far from an obvious investment at the time.
'In the three years since its acquisition, all of the major challenges faced by the building have been solved and it is now well on its way to being transformed from being an underperforming and outdated 34,000 m2 office building into a state-of-the-art, modern, world-class nearly 60,000 m2 full-service complex.'
