Land Securities partners with Lindner Group

UK REIT Land Securities has announced the formation of a partnership between its Trillium property outsourcing business and German property company Lindner Group to drive Trillium's expansion into the German Public Private Partnership (PPP) market.

Lindner Group, a Dusseldorf-based real estate and funds management group with over EUR 6bn in property funds under management, will serve as Land Securities Trillium's local partner. Its role will be to help identify PPP and Private Finance Initiative opportunities.

The PPP market in Germany encompasses almost EUR 19bn of projects in the procurement stage. Furthermore, the German government has said that 15% of future public infrastructure spending will be via PPP, the equivalent of EUR 5bn annually. Lindner Group's director, Juergen Bader, will lead the partnership activities. As former CIO at the Bayer Pension Fund he structured the first open ended fund vehicle for institutional PPP investments, ImmoSafe.

Land Securities Trillium ceo Ian Ellis said: 'The German market is one where we believe there are many opportunities and we are confident that working with the Lindner Group and their extensive networks will help us tap into the exciting market.'

Land Securities plans to demerge into three separate listed companies covering its London, retail and Trillium businesses. Land Securities has said it will go ahead with the split only when market circumstances are favourable.

In its preliminary results for the year to end-March 2008, Land Securities reported an £1.28bn or 8.8% drop in the value of its real estate holdings to around £13.58bn. However CEO Francis Salway said the company had outperformed the outperformed the Investment Property Databank's all-property index by 6.5%. 'The market is demanding but we have performed well in relative terms this year and our results show considerable success in terms of value preservation in the face of a sharply falling market,' he said.