Finnish Ilmarinen joins France's Amundi in Frankfurt office buy

The Finnish pension fund and insurer Ilmarinen has joined forces with French company Amundi Immobilier to buy an office property in Frankfurt from JP Morgan Asset Management in a 50-50 co-investment. The property, at Theodore Heuss Allee 50 in Frankfurt's business district, is fully let to Commerzbank.

Amundi and Ilmarinen bought the property for an open-ended fund they co-manage, said property advisor BNP Paribas Real Estate which advised the seller, along with CBRE. The 31,800 sqm office near the trade fair is fully leased to Germany's second–largest bank Commerzbank, which has been in the building since 2004 and last year signed a new long-term lease.

Management of the building, which has BREEAM sustainability certification, will be taken over by Paris-based asset manager L’Etoile Properties, which also advised the buyers. Amundi Immobilier last year doubled transactions to around €3.6bn, with the total of its assets under management rising 39% to €12.9bn.

Helsinki-based Ilmarinen is one of Finland’s largest real estate investors with assets worth €3.1bn. This latest deal is the company's second in Germany, after buying the Königstadt Carree, an office and hotel complex in Berlin, late last year.

Prior to the Berlin deal, Ilmarinen had bought a 50% stake in a second Brussels office property from Munich-based Hannover Leasing, who will continue to manage the 72,000 sqm Covent Garden office scheme, near the Rogier metro station. The property is valued at more than €300m. Earlier in the year, in another deal with Schroder Real Estate, Ilmarinen had bought into a company that owns the 100-metre Bastion Tower office complex in the centre of Brussels.

Ilmarinen is one of the largest institutional investors in the Finnish real estate market, but has begun diversifying its portfolio geographically through joint venture partnerships. Overall the group has about €35bn in assets and plans to boost its directly-held real estate qota from 8.8% to 15% by 2020. It has made a number of investments in Sweden, but says that Germany is "very strong on its radar", with a focus on office and retail properties in Germany's eight largest cities.