'Unrealistic' pricing prompts Tristan to withdraw retail portfolio

Tristan Capital Partners has withdrawn a £1.5 bn (€1.9 bn) retail portfolio from the market after failing to reach agreement on the pricing.

'We went through the process but pulled it from the market at the end of last year,' the company’s CEO Ric Lewis told PropertyEU. 'The bid pricing was not realistic. We had always assumed that a sale of the parts over time would be more lucrative than a massive sale of the sum of the parts, but we became intrigued to investigate otherwise.'

Dubbed Project Matrix, the mammoth retail portfolio included a diverse range of assets including supermarkets and shopping centres in Finland, the UK, Spain, Poland and Austria with a yield profile of around 7%. Some of the properties were single-let while others were multi-let and there was a vast difference in quality, sources contacted by PropertyEU said. ‘It was a poorly conceived idea, the market didn’t like it,’ one source who asked to remain anonymous said.

According to well-informed sources, the potential buyers lowered the revised bid prices for the portfolio by some 10%.

Lewis conceded that the portfolio was not homogenous, but claims the package was put on the market following speculative enquires from agents on behalf of numerous unnamed potential buyers. Had it gone ahead, the sale would have marked Tristan’s largest single exit since the company was founded in 2009.

Tristan has not changed its strategy following the collapsed sale, Lewis said. ‘We still believe in retail and are still accumulating retail properties. We are in the midst of multiple sales of individual properties and portfolios of properties.'

Lewis stressed that the retail properties the company has accumulated so far were never acquired with a specific view to a portfolio sale. ‘The value of the assets stand up on an individual sales basis,’ he said.

According to a report in Property Week earlier last year, some 35 assets were considered for the portfolio. It is believed that UK assets accounted for 46% of the total, with a further 20% in Poland, 12% in Germany, 10% in Spain, 10% in Finland and 2% in Austria. The portfolio had an average lot size of £42.8 mln and was 91% let at the time with an average unexpired lease term of 7.5 years.

JLL and Eastdil were the agents involved with the potential portfolio sale.