Tristan Capital Partners has made its first foray into the Northern Irish market with the purchase of a shopping centre for £34 mln (€48 mln).
Tristan Capital Partners has made its first foray into the Northern Irish market with the purchase of a shopping centre for £34 mln (€48 mln).
The core-plus style CCP IV fund bought the Erneside centre in Enniskillen from the Diageo Pension Trust in a joint venture with shopping centre investor Ellandi, which will act as asset manager.
The building has a floor area of 14,700 m2 and attracts around 3 million visitors a year, with Marks & Spencer, Next and New Look as anchor tenants.
Tristan said the relatively low prices in Northern Ireland combined with the recent recovery market made it an attractive time to invest in the province.
Associate director Chris Webb said: ‘The Northern Irish market is still showing a disproportionate yield discount to the UK mainland, but this is disappearing quickly as both investor demand and the availability of competitively priced bank debt increases.’
The region’s market is dominated by local private companies after most pension funds and insurers sold off their holdings in the years after the millennium, in deals heavily financed by banks in the Republic of Ireland.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as values fell sharply, these highly geared assets were retained by banks, Ireland’s “bad bank” the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), and administrators.
The recent upturn in the market has prompted several UK-based pension schemes, listed property companies and non-listed real estate funds to increase their investment activity in Northern Ireland.
