GLOBAL – A consortium of US public pension schemes and one Malaysian institutional investor has agreed a £700m (€830.8m) sale-and-leaseback deal to refinance 12 of Spire Healthcare's 38 UK hospitals.
Moor Park Capital, which arranged the deal and led the consortium, identified good rental coverage and the strong underlying private healthcare business as primary attractions of the deal.
Moor Park Capital partner Jagdeep Kapoor said: "We are strong believers in the UK private acute healthcare market and the real estate that sits behind these assets."
The firm specialises in sale-and-leaseback transactions involving multiple assets with single tenants.
Although Kapoor declined to identify the consortium members – or their stakes in the deal – citing confidentiality, he indicated that in this case scale had been a criterion for inclusion.
"This is a large transaction, and these investors have a capacity to do transactions of this scale," he said of the "very small" group of investors.
"Size, complexity and transparency were key attributes of the transaction," he said.
"The kind of institutional investors in our pool of investors understand these key attributes and are very happy to be closely involved in understanding and underwriting such transactions."
Yet he identified a broader appetite for sale-and-leaseback deals among institutional investors seeking fixed income-style, asset-backed, inflation-adjusted returns with collateral.
He also denied that Asian sovereign wealth funds and North American public pension funds had shown more interest in their European counterparts in refinancing deals.
"It is not entirely true that investors are region-specific," said Kapoor.
"For each transaction, it depends on a lot of factors which type of investors are looking to invest in large transactions.
"Moor Park specialises in identifying the pool of investors interested in a particular transaction that meets the investment criteria of those investors."
