French asset manager Primonial is closing in on the acquisition of over €500 mln worth of healthcare properties in France, PropertyEU has learned.
The acquisitions, which are expected to be announced in a few weeks, are structured as club deals and involve one healthcare-only and one healthcare and hospitality portfolio across France.
‘We have already signed a preliminary agreement to buy the assets but we haven’t closed the purchase yet,’ Laurent Fléchet, head of Primonial’s real estate business told PropertyEU.
The acquisitions would be the second major club deals carried out by Primonial in 2021. Earlier this year, the group emerged as the buyer of the Shift office building in Paris in a €620 mln transaction with partners La Française and EDF Invest.
New European platform for real estate activities
Club deals are not the only major operation going on at the French asset manager. In fact, Primonial is buzzing with activity. As part of its plans to step up its European presence, the group is preparing a major rebranding for later this year in an attempt to harmonise all real estate activities between the different countries and entities. The new platform will consolidate all of Primonial’s subsidiaries.
'Today Primonial Group is well known but this is not the case for its subsidiaries and its structure. What we are doing is to establish a new platform that will bring all the units under one single roof,’ Fléchet said. ‘We are aiming to become a major European player and grow our market share in a number of European markets and especially in Germany,’ Fléchet said. ‘We are looking to expand both into new product types as well as into new countries.’
The company currently has offices in France, Germany and in Italy but has occasionally invested in most of the European countries. It is currently raising equity for two funds for institutional investors, a European Social Infrastructure fund (ESI) which is targeting a €1 bn volume, and its first build-to-rent fund (Perf II), which manages assets worth €400 mln following a first investment in Spain through a joint venture with Grupo Lar, a local developer, in mid-2020. The fund is targeting a €1 bn size through investments across Europe as well.
On the retail side, Primonial has set itself an ambitious fundraising target of €2 bn of new equity for this year for its French retail funds and said it is proceeding ahead of expectations despite the pandemic. In Germany the group is in the process of launching its first retail fund, focused on the healthcare property sector. As it is the first such vehicle for the group in Germany, Primonial does not have a specific target in mind for it. ‘It is important to make a start attracting retail investors in Germany,’ commented Jurgen Fenk, who joined the group in March from Austria’s Signa Group to accelerate Primonial’s international development.
The group will start marketing the fund in the coming weeks through the usual retail and mutual banking networks. It is working with an external KVG, Intreal, to set up the fund. ‘But our plan for the future is to get our own regulated entity. This way, we will be able to give retail businesses the same importance as our institutional operations already have in Germany – this is how we have been doing it in France for several years now,’ Fenk noted.
