In a busy week, Blackstone, Landsec and Segro were buying and Goldman Sachs, Macquarie and Meadow Partners closed new funds.
Blackstone hoovered up more hotels and logistics in separate transactions, the largest being a circa £800 mln acquisition of UK chain, Village Hotels. The real estate giant also bought more logistics, this time 22 urban distribution investments from NREP in Finland.
Hotels' popularity with investors saw Icamap and Ivanhoe Cambridge preparing to test the market with a €450 mln sale of the easyHotel business, according to Green Street News. And NH Hotels put one of its NH Collection properties, in Amsterdam, up for sale.
Segro announced it had managed to buy three large and very reversionary Dutch logistics warehouses, for £222 mln, and Landsec backed its conviction about UK prime shopping centres by buying out GIC from Bluewater, the 155,000 m2 Kent mall, spending £120 mln on the Singapore sovereign wealth fund's 17.5% stake.
The Nordic's strong pick up in transactions continued with more residential changing hands as well as a large Norwegian office. In the UK, regional specialist Harworth pulled off a coup, selling a former power station site it bought for £3 mln 10 years ago, and then remediated, to Microsoft for over £100 mln, for a hyperscale data centre.
Goldman Sachs said its $3.4 bn close of Vintage Real Estate Partners III, was the largest dedicated real estate secondaries fund ever raised.
Macquarie held the final close on $1.9 bn for opportunity fund Macquarie Real Estate Partners, which will cover global developed markets. In Europe it has already invested in rental housing platform, Goodstone Living in the UK and European sustainable office developer, Edge.
Meadow Real Estate Fund VI garnered $530 mln and is targeting London and New York.
In the private debt market, French banks were active, writing three separate €300 mln - €400 mln finance packages. One was a refinancing for 3,800 beds in the Greater Paris area for Brookfield's Uxco Group - which Uxco said is one of the largest ever completed for student residential assets in France.
