Editor's Choice: A decade of deals

PropertyEU was founded in 2006 at the height of the last debt-fuelled real estate investment feeding frenzy which came to an abrupt end following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Global Financial Crisis.

Now that the market is back at full steam, we feel it is fitting to mark our 10th anniversary by putting the best investment transactions and most innovative dealmakers front and centre in 2016.

We will not just be focussing on the biggest dealmakers: anyone can spend money. A key criterion for any investor putting money into a private or public structure is whether the manager is able to spend it wisely and generate healthy returns. These criteria will also be key for the PropertyEU Deal Awards programme we plan to roll out in the next months and which will culminate in a series of Deal of the Year and Deal of the Decade events at the end of the year.

Deal of the month
Each month we will collect candidates for our Deal of the Year Awards and the first nominations will be announced at the end of January and published in the February edition of our monthly magazine. In the course of this year we will also invite a special advisory committee to help us select candidates for our Deal of the Decade Award which readers will be able to vote on later in the year.

Alongside our Deal Awards programme, we will also be launching a special series of articles delving into the development of the European real estate industry in the past decade. How have the leading European organisations like ULI, ICSC, RICS, Epra and Inrev evolved and what are their plans for the coming decade?

In addition, we will take a closer look at the investment management industry both in the public and private domain. During the past decade, the sources of capital targeting the European real estate industry - both public and private - have broadened enormously and now encompass investors from new markets in Asia and the Middle East. The sophistication of these players is astounding and both Epra and Inrev have been important facilitators in their respective sectors by setting guidelines that have spurred further transparency and professionalism among both public and private players.

Lessons learned
While the current cycle is seeing some froth and silliness in certain spots, on the whole the market is characterised by an awareness of the need for larger portions of equity and moderate debt levels. We will look closer at the lessons that have been learned in the past decade and how pension funds and insurance companies view the industry as they continue their search for the long-term returns that are becoming difficult to obtain from bonds and fixed-income assets.

In that sense, Europe is still very much in the picture with many institutional investors keen to increase their real estate allocations to real estate in this part of the world. It's not just the European institutions that are spreading their wings; their North American, Asian and Middle Eastern peers are increasingly feeling very much at home in the UK and Europe. Indeed, it is fair to say that in recent years Europe has taken centre stage in the international real estate world.

Christmas presents
Our news coverage over the Christmas period highlights how institutions are deploying their massive firepower, sometimes directly and sometimes through mandates and funds, to purchase choice real estate assets.

For instance, fund manager AEW Europe acquired the 192,000 m2 Festival Place shopping centre in the English town of Basingstoke for an estimated €390 mln on 21 December. Paris-based AEW was acting on behalf of its joint venture with Teacher Retirement System of Texas. On the same day UBS, acting on behalf of a German pension fund, acquired 20 inner-city food retail units in Germany for €132 mln.

Sweden's AMF underscored the dominance of pension money in Stockholm's office market in December by picking up a 46,000 m2 asset for €323 mln, while in the UK Canadian pension scheme CPPIB and UK asset manager Hermes completed the acquisition of Haymarket House in London’s West End for €220 mln.

We could go on and on, and it isn't just the institutional investors that are hitting the headlines. The PropertyEU Research team is kept very busy updating its European investment transaction database which is being enriched on a daily basis by transactions carried out by a host of fund managers, listed property companies, private equity firms and everything in between.

Top Investors programme
PropertyEU was launched 10 years ago to focus on real estate investment deals in Europe to identify who's investing in what, where, why and how in European commercial real estate. In recent years we went a step further with the creation of the PropertyEU Top 100 Investors, which focuses on the top deals and dealmakers in March and a ranking of top investors by assets under management in October.

Our research team is now hard at work crunching the 2015 data for the Top Dealmakers ranking that will be published at Mipim in Cannes in March. It will be interesting to see whether US private equity players Cerberus, Lone Star and Blackstone will retain the three top spots they secured in the last edition or whether new names are rising up the ranks.

We wish all our readers a happy, healthy and newsworthy 2016 and look forward to reporting on new deals and dealmakers in the course of the year. Stay tuned for more details!

Cormac Mac Ruairi
Deals Editor