France's Perial makes German debut with €116m office buy

French asset manager Perial has made its first entry into the German market by buying a portfolio of offices worth €116m from a fund managed by Patrizia Immobilien.

The 10 properties, totaling around 85,000 sqm of leasable space on 200,000 sqm of land, are located throughout the state of Hesse, and were acquired for Perial's SCPI PF02 fund. The properties are all fully let to a range of German local authorities and have an average WALT of nearly 14 years.

Among the most prominent are the police headquarters on Wiesbadener Strasse and the Statistical Office on Rheinstrasse, both in the state capital of Wiesbaden. Other properties are in Bad Hersfeld, Marburg, Kassel, Michelstadt, Friedberg, Giessen and Korbach.

Long-term followers of the Augsburg-based Patrizia Immobilien will recognise the assets as coming from the LEO portfolios, which Patrizia bought in 2013/14

According to Yann Guivarc'h, CEO of Perial Asset Management, "This, our first transaction in Europe, illustrates our desire to enrich and diversify the portfolio of PFO2 with assets located outside our domestic markets." Perial invested €582m for its funds and mandates in 2016 and plans further investments of €800m in 2017, including more deals in the eurozone, he said.

BayernLB in Paris financed the deal, while BNP PRE was the exclusive broker for the portfolio. Perial was advised by L'Etoile Properties, which has also been mandated to manage the portfolio. LPA-CGR in Paris and Munich advised on legal matters, Albrings & Muller on technical issues, while BUK carried out the environmental audit.

The family-run Perial has more than €2bn in assets under management with more than 30,000 individual shareholders in its funds. The group has its roots in the Perrin family, glovemakers from Grenoble, and the Amiens-based velvet producer Cosserat, which collaborated successfully for decades before branching into property, and developing the first special vehicle SPCIs in France.