Canada’s Slate buys fresh German retail portfolio for €31.5m

The Toronto-headquartered Slate Asset Management continues to make inroads into the grocery real estate and Fachmarktzentrum market in Germany with another acquisition.

Its latest deal – its tenth portfolio acquisition in Germany since 2016 – involves 27 properties with a lettable area of about 60,000 sqm, which it bought for €31.5m.

The assets are located in nine different German states, albeit with an emphasis on Baden-Württember and Bavaria, while the main tenants are grocers Edeka and discounters Netto and Penny.

The deal brings Slate’s European portfolio up to 160 grocery real estate properties across Germany, with a total of 260,000 sqm of lettable space. The company said in a statement that it plans to continue expanding within Germany with grocery-anchored deals. Among its major tenants are the biggest retail names, including Edeka, REWE, Lidl and Aldi.

The assets will be allocated to Slate’s European Real Estate Limited Partnership I fund. The group originally kicked off its European strategy in October 2016, when it bought 67 properties from the Belfry and Trust portfolios from the Euronext-listed Eurocastle group of closed-end funds, with 136,000 sqm of gross lettable space. The assets had been valued by Eurocastle at the time at €128m.

The company maintains its European office in Frankfurt. Founded in 2005 by brothers Blair and Brady Welch, it now has more than €6bn of assets under management worldwide.