Six institutional investors, including one from Italy, have been picked as finalists in the bid to acquire Unicredit's €350 mln-plus headquarters in Milan, PropertyEU has learned.
Six institutional investors, including one from Italy, have been picked as finalists in the bid to acquire Unicredit's €350 mln-plus headquarters in Milan, PropertyEU has learned.
Rome-based asset manager Sorgente, as well as US private equity firm Blackstone and JP Morgan are understood to be three of the six investors which have been selected to make a non-binding bid and carry out the second phase of due diligence on the asset, which dates back to the early 1900s and provides around 50,000 m2 of office space in central Milan.
The complex, also known as Palazzo Broggi, received around 10 non-binding offers from a very diverse range of international investors, including sovereign wealth funds from Singapore and Abu Dhabi, as well as opportunistic players including Cerberus.
PropertyEU reported in July that asset manager IdeaFimit had hired CBRE to market the scheme for a price of over €350 mln. The asset is fully let to Unicredit on a 12-year lease but only 30% of the space is actually used by the bank.
The sale is expected to complete before the end of the year.
'This is expected to be the largest single-asset deal in Italy of the year,' said Rodolfo Petrosino, managing director at landlord IdeaFimit, speaking at the Expo Real trade fair at the beginning of October.
The landmark office complex is owned by IdeaFimit’s Fondo Omicron Plus, which bought it in 2009 as part of a larger acquisition of €800 mln of assets from lender Unicredit.