Hansainvest Real Assets increased its real estate and infrastructure assets under management by about €450 mln to €4.8 bn during 2017.
The total transaction volume for the Hamburg-based asset manager came to around €545 mln in 2017. Around €515 mln of this was attributable to acquisitions and around €30 mln to sales.
The biggest transactions included the acquisition of residential properties in Germany, an apartment complex in Denver (Colorado, USA), two office properties in Helsinki and Warsaw, and a logistics property in Germany. Hansainvest mainly divested smaller and older properties as well as a retirement home.
Hansainvest's chairman Nicholas Brinckmann said: '2017 was a successful year for us, particularly in terms of transactions. We acquired another very promising property in Denver, Colorado, for our US residential real estate fund. In addition, we contractually secured a very attractive property in the form of the Generation Park X office building in Warsaw.'
Hansainvest Real Assets was also concluded or renewed 185 leases during 2017. This corresponded to around 90,000 m2of newly let space. Martina Averbeck, managing director with responsibility for real estate asset management, commented: 'We significantly improved our portfolio’s occupancy rate with several new leases. The rate rose from around 91% at the end of 2016 to around 94% at the end of 2017.'
Commenting on plans for 2018, Brinckmann said there would be acquisitions in Hansainvest's core markets of the US, Western Europe and Germany in 2018. 'I expect the acquisition volume to be at roughly the same level as in 2017. We also intend to expand our project development activities. In addition to our own developments, we also increasingly want to enter into joint ventures with other project developers. This will allow us to achieve larger volumes.'
PropertyEU's annual Top Investors ranking based on European real estate transaction volumes is published in May 2018.
