A portfolio of 21 commercial properties has been put on the market by a state-owned fund managed by Italian asset manager Investire Immobiliare Sgr, marking the start of a larger disposal of real estate by the Italian state, PropertyEU has learned.

A portfolio of 21 commercial properties has been put on the market by a state-owned fund managed by Italian asset manager Investire Immobiliare Sgr, marking the start of a larger disposal of real estate by the Italian state, PropertyEU has learned.

Investire Immobiliare, part of Banca Finnat Euramerica, has hired CBRE to market the assets which consist of office buildings entirely let to the public administration. According to well-informed market sources, the portfolio has a value of around €800 mln and covers a total of 800,000 m2 of space.

The assets, owned by Investire's state-owned Fondo Immobili Pubblici, will be offered largely to international investors as a whole portfolio as well as in sub-portfolios.

Launched in 2004, FIP was the first real estate fund created by the Italian government as part of a major privatisation effort and owns around 400 buildings across the country.

The assets for sale are largely located in Northern Italy, in the regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as well as in the Lazio and Tuscany regions with some located in the South - Abruzzo and Apulia.

They are home to public administration offices including public pension funds INAIL, INPS, the Ministry of Transport, the Internal Revenue Service, the Customs Agency, the Police, the Ministry of Labour, and the Territorial agency.

All the properties are leased with a master lease agreement to the Agenzia del Demonio, the country's public real estate agency, with a contract running to December 2022. In total, the portfolio generates gross annual rents of over €63 mln.

'The disposal is part of the fund's strategy to raise value,' said fund manager Mario Previsdomini. To date, the vehicle has sold over 150 assets for a total of €1 bn largely on an asset-by-asset basis to local private investors.

For 2014, the fund plans to raise between €250 mln and €300 mln from the sales, he added. 'We believe the market is once again ready for portfolio sales,' commented Previsdomini.

'We are starting with presenting this investment opportunity to a selected number of international investors, largely North American ones. We believe this is an interesting income-generating portfolio which also provides some value-add opportunities,' said Paolo Bellacosa, executive director, head of Capital Markets at CBRE Italy.

The Italian State, through its Demanio agency, has also recently put for sale 50 historic sites to raise funds to cut its public debt and comply with European Union budget guidelines. Among the properties for sale is an island in the Venice lagoon and a 15th century bastion.

Minister for the economy Fabrizio Saccomanni aims to make €500 mln from the sell-off, which was approved as part of an emergency decree aimed at keeping Italy’s 2013 budget deficit within 3% to avoid corrective action by Brussels.