Imfarr the Austrian private developer/investor which bought Frankfurt’s Silver Tower at the end of 2020 with the Ketterer family office, is buying the HighLight Towers in Munich.
The deal is in exclusivity according to brokers. It will be the second €600 mln+ office acquisition led by Imfarr in the last six months. The Imfarr/Ketterer JV paid €630 mln for Silver Tower; HighLight Towers’ vendor, Commerz Real, is seeking at least €650 mln.
One broker said: ‘Imfarr is currently very aggressively building up a large scale German real estate platform. Rumors say that in the background it is Mr. Ketterer’s money again. However, officially, it’s a club of Austrian billionaires.’
Imfarr is owned by Nemat Farrokhinia and was founded in 2007 to develop and buy large buildings in Austrian and German cities.
Commerz Real put HighLight Towers on the market with an unofficial price target of €700 mln last year, mandating BNP Paribas and CBRE for the sale.
The complex was built in 2004, has 71,600 m2 of office space and was valued not long ago at €577 mln. It is located on the edge of the city, at Park City Schwabig and is the second-tallest office building in Munich, according to Commerz Real.
Commerz bought the buildings in 2016 and completed leasing up the following year. It had 13 tenants including IBM, Fujitsu and Unify. As well as two 33 and 28 storey towers it includes a 7-storey Meliá INNSIDE Hotel and a smaller 5-storey office building.
As well as the Silver Tower, Imfarr and Ketterer’s SN family office, also bought Nestle’s 40,000 m2 office building at Niederaad on Frankfurt’s Lyoner Strasse late last year, for about €130 mln.
After a dearth of large office transaction in Germany in Q1 2021, HighLight Towers will be the second in Q2. Union Investment and Hines are believed to have paid Blackstone €650 mln for MediaWorks, an office complex also in Munich.
