TIAA Henderson Real Estate (TH Real Estate) has sold its 50% share in Warburg-Henderson, a €4.7 bn joint venture in Germany, to Hamburgische Immobilien Handlung (HIH).

TIAA Henderson Real Estate (TH Real Estate) has sold its 50% share in Warburg-Henderson, a €4.7 bn joint venture in Germany, to Hamburgische Immobilien Handlung (HIH).

HIH is a property investment company within German banking group MM Warburg & Co. The remaining 50% stake in the joint venture remains with MM Warburg.

Warburg-Henderson is being merged with HIH's subsidiary, HIH Global Invest Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft (HGI), and the combined company is to be renamed Warburg-HIH Invest Real Estate.

Warburg-HIH Invest Real Estate will have some €10 bn of assets under management, making it one of Germany's leading real estate investment managers for institutional investors.

Comment
'Merging the two alternative investment fund (AIF) management companies will make us even more efficient in providing the entire product spectrum for institutional real estate investors as a one-stop shop in the future,' said Erik Marienfeldt, managing director of HIH. 'Being able to respond quickly is of the essence in the current market environment. There is just no better way to deliver that than via a unified corporate structure,' he added.

HIH will continue to be the exclusive asset manager for Warburg-HIH in relation to investments in Germany, while TH Real Estate is being retained as asset manager for European property investments outside Germany. 'As a strategic partnership, Warburg-Henderson is a success story, and we look forward to working with HIH and exploiting the new perspectives in order to add new chapters to it as a European asset manager,' said Timothy Horrocks, head of Germany at TH Real Estate.

IntReal, the third-party investment and asset manager unit of the former German joint venture, will not be affected by the ownership change and merger.

MM Warburg & CO and Henderson Global Investors Property (since renamed TH Real Estate) founded Warburg-Henderson as a joint venture in 2001. With €4.7 bn in real estate assets under management, Warburg-Henderson is one of Germany's three leading players in the field of open-ended real estate special alternative investment funds.

Top Investors
Warburg-Henderson featured in 64th place in PropertyEU's ranking of real estate dealmakers by transaction volume in 2014. TH Real Estate appears in 7th place. Check out the Top dealmaker ranking here

Investment Briefing
PropertyEU's latest morning investment briefing on the German market takes place at the offices of TH Real Estate in London on Thursday 9 April