New-look GpX buys €89m Thor Portfolio from Orion
The listed, Berlin-based commercial property investor GxP German Properties AG is the new owner of the so-called Thor Portfolio, consisting of eight office properties across Germany. The seller is the Orion European Real Estate Fund IV from Orion Capital Management.
The 65,000 sqm package, valued at about €89m, includes the value-add assets of the €630m Odin portfolio, which Orion had originally bought as recently as 2015 from funds managed by Credit Suisse.
The properties in Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Neu-Isenburg, Dreieich, Düsseldorf-Meerbusch, Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Hannover are currently more than 80 % leased with short remaining lease terms. GxP put the initial rental yield at 8.7%. The deal was brokered exclusively by Frankfurt-based Waterway Investments.
According to Johannes Meran, CEO of GxP, the transaction was financed both from own funds raised in the course of the company's recent capital increase, as well as through debt financing in cooperation with HSH Nordbank AG. The funds were borrowed for a period of five years. They have an annual interest rate of 2.3% and will be amortized with 2.0% annually. Meran said in a statement that the company was in advanced talks about the purchase of further properties.
GxP used to be known as German Asset Management and was launched only in 2015, since when it has invested over €160m in office and retail properties across the country, in cities including Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt and Hannover. It was taken over earlier this year by Hamburg-based investment company Cleanventure AG, along with all its assets, and the company was renamed GxP.
The plan is to expand the portfolio to over €750m over the coming two years, with acquisitions of €250m already in the pipeline. The investment focus will remain on core-plus and value-add office and retail properties in German metropolitan areas and selected mid-size cities.
German Asset Management had been steadily building its own portfolio, in May this year adding a package worth €40m consisting of 12 properties from a bank sale. The assets included the Lenné-Passagen in Frankfurt/Oder, the Teltow-Towers in Teltow and six 'toom' DIY stores in cities including Düren, Halle an der Saale, and Düsseldorf. The average remaining lease terms were only 18 months. Most have since been extended to nine years.
Meran is a veteran of German and Austrian residential property since his days at the helm of listed Conwert immobilien. Sincle leaving Conwert, he founded Equity Partner GmbH in 2014, which to date has raised €800m of equity capital for the acquisition of various German property companies.
The broker of the latest GpX Thor Portfolio acquisition was Waterway Investments, headed up by Christian Zilly and Karsten Kohlmann. Waterway specialises in German non-core real estate assets, particularly in Germany's less-well researched secondary cities, the so-called B-, C- and D-locations.