Unibail-Rodamco has indicated its appetite for acquisitions of 'jumbo' shopping malls has not been sated by the EUR 715 mln purchase of the Simon Ivanhoe portfolio.
Unibail-Rodamco has indicated its appetite for acquisitions of 'jumbo' shopping malls has not been sated by the EUR 715 mln purchase of the Simon Ivanhoe portfolio.
Europe’s largest listed real estate firm in Europe said the acquisition of Simon Ivanhoe and its portfolio of seven existing shopping centres in France and Poland was carried out to deepen its penetration in the large shopping centre segment in both France and Warsaw.
‘The Simon Ivanhoe transaction is ultimately a transaction about three large assets,' Unibail-Rodamco CEO Guillaume Poitrinal told PropertyEU during a conference call on the group’s 2009 results on Monday. These assets are the 86,000-m2 Bay 1 and Bay 2 in Marne la Vallée in France and the 103,000-m2 Arkadia and 35,400-m2 Wilenska Station mall in Warsaw.
Poitrinal said the transaction was also ‘a sign of how alert’ Unibail-Rodamco is to important opportunities in the market. But the negotiations took several months. ‘It took quite long to convince both Simon Property Group and Ivanhoe Cambridge that, yes, this was the right price and that we were the right partner for the development pipeline. So there was some important structuring work to make this deal work.’
Unibail-Rodamco already owns 15 shopping centres in the region in and around Paris. It is also the major player in Warsaw with its Galeria Mokotów and Zlote Tarasy malls. Poitrinal said only a limited number of new opportunities are available. ‘But if we can find opportunities of that kind we will not hesitate.’
