Corpus Sireo launches €300m third German healthcare fund

Corpus Sireo, the German asset management arm of Swiss Life, has launched its third Spezialfonds healthcare fund with a target investment volume of €300m. Leveraging is expected to be about 50%.

The company has already been active in healthcare property markets for several years, running two specialist funds with committed capital of €430m and €150m respectively.

Four German institutional investors have already committed to seed The Corpus Sireo Health Care III Fund with €110m.  Announcing the new fund during the recent Expo REAL trade fair in Munich, Corpus Sireo said it expects to nail down further equity commitments of up to €80m over the next few months.

The fund has made its first investment, the MediaPark Clinic in Corpus Sireo's home town of Cologne. Fund manager Sebastian Schlansky said: “With the MediaPark Clinic in Cologne, we have already secured the first top property for the fund. Further properties are currently going through the due diligence process. We expect to have invested around €50m by the end of this year.”

The fund strategy is to invest in healthcare assets - outpatient facilities, polyclinics, medical care centres and healthcare centres - in major urban centres in Germany with an individual volume of between €5m and €40m, less than 10 years old with a minimum occupancy rate of 70% and an average lease term of at least eight years.

Marc-Philipp Martins Kuenzel, senior advisor with Corpus Sireo, said: "Following the launch of this fund, we are now the biggest provider in the healthcare real estate sector for German institutional investors. In the medium term, we would like to offer investment opportunities in this asset class to a wider public outside Germany as well. To this end, we are also looking at other sub-classes of healthcare assets in Germany and other European countries."

Corpus Sireo’s first two specialist healthcare funds are already fully invested. CS Health Care Fund I comprises 48 facilities with a total investment volume of around €450 mln, while CS Health Care II has received equity from six German institutional investors totaling €150 mln. The latter fund owns 15 properties throughout Germany, having recently acquired three nursing homes in Bremen, Rostock and Woltersdorf near Berlin.

As Ingo Hartlief, Corpus Sireo's CEO told a press briefing at the MIPIM in Cannes earlier this year, the new impetus given to his group by its ownership by, and close partnership with, parent company Swiss Life Asset Managers and its sister companies in Switzerland, France and Germany means that the company is actively on the acquisition trail. It said at the Expo REAL that it is currently performing due diligence on about €700m of property across Europe at the moment.

It also sold about €700m of real estate over the first six months of this year as transaction manager, following total sales last year of €2.3bn. Overall, Corpus Sireo manages €13.1bn of its own and third-party assets.