A €600 mln student housing portfolio and a stake in a regional shopping centre are put up for sale by Gecina and Nuveen Real Estate.
Gecina is reported to have hired Morgan Stanley to run a sales process for six Paris student accommodation assets, part of the leading French REIT's YouFirst platform.
Nuveen mandated Savills to sell its minority stake in the 1.7 million ft2 St James Quarter in Edinburgh which took eight years to develop and was leased up during Covid, completing in 2021. As well as shops, it includes restaurants, bars and 152 flats.
Deals closing this week include hotels, retail, logistics and residential. Notable was another luxury retail deal involving Blackstone. Following the US giant's £227 mln purchase of number 130-134 on London's New Bond Street shopping thoroughfare, Blackstone picked up two more luxury shops, in Paris.
The run of activity in the hotel sector continues, with a €400 mln portfolio deal in the Netherlands, as private equity hotel specialist KSL reaps the reward of investing during covid to sell now.
PE firm Kildare Partners successfully landed a €720 mln refinancing of the Finnish flexible office company Technopolis which Kildare took private in 2018 in a €730 mln cash deal, subsequently maintaining a 90%+ occupancy rate and growing income YOY.
Kildare's CIO, Ellis Short, said that the lending consortium, led by Citi, were 'impressed with the performance of our portfolio, particularly its resilience during Covid, which allowed us to secure the ongoing support of the existing lenders, but also to attract a few new lenders into the syndicate.'
Meanwhile, CBRE Investment Management's value add fund refinanced a 275,000 ft City office building with German bank LBBW and non-bank lender Delancy after a competitive process run by CBRE Debt & Structured Finance.
Fund manager Christina Forrest said refinancing risk continues to be significant, and so they were 'delighted' to receive 'an exceptionally high number of offers for the refinancing from a variety of leading banks and debt funds.'
Two fund managers said they plan to launch new European debt funds in an otherwise still quiet capital raising market.
