The investment manager issued a €750 mln green bond for its flagship core European fund and secured a €1.28 bn refinancing for Malaysian clients.
The €1.28 bn (£1.1 bn) loan is for the stabilised commercial element of the mixed-use London Battersea Power station redevelopment. CBRE IM advised the Malaysian consortium which owns the commercial assets and after more than a year of work, secured the capital with the original banking club: Standard Chartered, Malaysian-based banks CIMB and Maybank, and Singaporean lenders OCBC and DBS.
The original construction debt was put in place in 2019. Incorporating the Grade II-listed power station, the whole development, including residential, covers 8 million ft2. One member of the owning consortium, Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF), has been a long-standing client of CBRE IM.
This week the investment manager also returned to the public debt market after circa three years, on behalf of PEC, its flagship Pan-European Core Fund, one of the biggest, if not the largest, diversified open-ended vehicles in Europe.
The 10-year, green issuance was the first of a €3 bn Euro Medium Term Note programme, and it was oversubscribed 3x, by 120 investors.
Mark Pennington, fund chief financial officer, CBRE IM commented: 'We have seen a significant improvement of the bond markets since October last year, and that strong demand for real estate paper has continued in 2024. This bond issuance marks the first diversified core fund to tap the market again since April 2022.
'The fund is set up to benefit from a wide variety of debt sources, but we clearly prefer the public bond market because of its ticket size and ease of use. Especially now that we have an EMTN Programme, there is a lot of flexibility to pick the best issuance window to do another capital markets funding round.'
The eight deals tracked this week are all under €100 mln in transaction size each, ranging across a Spanish logistics portfolio, mid-sized offices in London and Dublin, German logistics, a Stockholm office building and a large mixed-use business park and two supermarkets, in the UK.
Assets on the market include a large London City office building with consent for conversion to a hotel and two large greater London build-to-rent developments developed by Greystar and Henderson Park which will be an interesting test of where values are.
We also list four funds in the market, targeting hospitality, debt, data centres and smaller value add deals.
