M7 Real Estate, the investment manager specialised in European multi-let properties, has formed a new joint venture with a US investment manager to acquire up to €250 mln of assets in Portugal.

M7 Real Estate, the investment manager specialised in European multi-let properties, has formed a new joint venture with a US investment manager to acquire up to €250 mln of assets in Portugal.

M7 has appointed Leonardo Peres as managing director for Portugal and opened a Lisbon office, the eighth in its pan-European platform.

Peres will work with the team in London to acquire and manage multi-let assets focused around the conurbations of Lisbon and Porto for the new joint venture.

'Portugal is on the radar of many real estate investors because of its improving economy and attractive pricing. With the opening of the Lisbon office M7 will have on-the-ground expertise to find investment opportunities in a market where it is difficult to establish scale,' said Richard Croft, M7 Real Estate’s CEO. 'We have a healthy pipeline of potential investments with which to build a meaningful portfolio of income-producing assets.'

Peres joins M7 from CBRE, where he has worked for eight years, most recently as a senior consultant with responsibility for investment and leasing transactions in the industrial and logistics sectors.

He will be responsible for both the acquisition and asset management programmes, working with M7’s team in London, and will manage the growth of the M7 Portuguese platform.

M7 Real Estate has a team of 85 staff operating a platform in the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland and Portugal. The business is currently wholly owned by its senior managers and manages a portfolio of 370 assets comprising 2.7 million m2 valued at €1.3 bn.