Union Investment's hotel fund has acquired a three-asset portfolio in the first major sale-and-leaseback transaction carried out by the Motel One Group.
Union Investment's hotel fund has acquired a three-asset portfolio in the first major sale-and-leaseback transaction carried out by the Motel One Group.
The Union Investment institutional hotel fund, UII Hotel Nr. 1, had previously signed an agreement to acquire Motel One 'Deutsches Museum' in Munich at the end of September.
At an event on the eve of Expo Real, Union Investment announced that its fund has now acquired a portfolio comprises Motel One 'Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof', 'Frankfurt East Side' and 'Stuttgart-Feuerbach'. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
This is the Motel One Group's first portfolio transaction to be structured as a sale-and-leaseback, signing long-term lease for the properties.
The portfolio includes a total of 693 rooms across a gross floor area of some 22,821m2. The properties in Stuttgart and Frankfurt opened for business in 2007 and were fully refurbished in 2012. The hotel in Düsseldorf was opened in June 2013. All three hotels are centrally located, with good public transport links.
'Our partnership with Motel One as a financially strong hotel operator is allowing us to establish a solid foundation for further expansion of our portfolio in the form of hotel real estate that offers stable income, said Christoph Schumacher, a member of the management team at Union Investment Institutional Property, which is responsible for managing the institutional fund.
'We are pleased to have the opportunity to develop our partnership with Union Investment through our first sale-and-leaseback transaction and that our attractive hotels are contributing to the expansion of this thematic fund,” said Dieter Müller, CEO and founder of the Motel One Group.
The investment focus of the UII Hotel No. 1 fund, which was launched by Union Investment on 1 April 2013, is the growing budget and midscale segment. In the medium term, the target size of the fund is €250 mln, comprising between 10 and 15 hotels from different operators.
