Greenman buys third asset for German retail fund
The acquisitive Irish property investment manager Greenman Investments has added a further inner-city retail property to its burgeoning German funds portfolio, buying a retail centre in the city of Kamen, closed to Dortmund in North Rhine-Westphalia. The transaction was a share deal, thought to have been valued at close to €25m.
The Kamen Quadrat is a 'hybrid centre', which normally ranges in size between a specialist retail park, or Fachmarktzentrum, and a larger retail centre. Typically such a centre is anchored by a large food retailer and covers the entire range of food, near food, and non-food needs. Centrally located in small and medium-sized towns, they cater for demand from the surrounding areas not served by large shopping centres.
The Kamen Quadrat is a new centre, opening only in July 2015. It has 7,730 sqm of lettable space. Grocery chain Rewe is the largest tenant with 37% of the space, while discounter Netto is the next largest, with 18% of the space. Drugstore Rossmann, shoe seller Deichmann, and six other tenants occupy the remaining space.
According to John Wilkinson, the ebullient CEO of Greenman Investments, the purchase is a good fit for the company's Greenman Retail+ fund. “The anchor tenant, Rewe, has signed a contract for 20 years, and the other contracts have terms of ten to 15 years. This makes the centre an extremely attractive investment in our view. The mix of tenants as well as the exceptional location in the pedestrian zone in Kamen’s city centre convinced us to buy this property. Kamen also offers the right framework conditions for retail. At 138.0, its retail centrality is way above the German average.”
This is Greenman's third sizeable deal for its Retail+ fund, following its buy of another hybrid centre at nearby Datteln for €26.4m last November, and an earlier acquisition of the Tribseer Centre at Stralsund on Germany's Baltic coast for €19m. All three deals were advised on by Berlin law firm Bottermann Khorrami LLP, with Dahlke Investment being the broker.
Greenman, which is focused entirely on the German retail market, in 2014 became the first Irish-owned investment manager to be approved by the Central Bank of Ireland as an Alternative Investment Fund Manager. The firm is, which is Irish-based but also has offices in Luxembourg and Germany, aims to provide Irish investors with an opportunity to invest in real estate funds which own large German food retailing stores and neighbourhood shopping centres.
In a notable deal last April, Greenman paid €95m to take over 29 grocery stores from Edeka, Germany's largest grocer. It currently has close to €300m of assets under management, which it plans to increase to over €500m by this summer.