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Healthcare
Last year Primonial bought €800m of German healthcare assets in one deal, the biggest healthcare deal of the year in Germany.
The Cologne-based investor and asset manager Corpus Sireo, currently adapting to its new life as part of Swiss insurance giant Swiss Life, has long had expertise in the German nursing home and healthcare sector. Now it’s turning its attention to medical practice properties, where it is seeking equity for its first German fund invested solely in the sector.
According to Corpus Sireo fund manager Marc-Philipp Martins Kuenzel, the actual category is not just buildings housing private doctors and other medical professionals, but properties focused on healthcare and on-site physical treatment, including existing properties and not just purpose-built new assets. Kuenzel said he expect the fund to start up in the first half of 2015, as soon as he has €75m in equity commitments raised. The fund expects to raise double that, to give it firepower of €300m with leverage. This compares to Corpus Sireo’s earlier 2006 Healthcare Fund Nr. 1, a Luxembourg-registered vehicle which had a €440m volume at its peak.
Kuenzel said there were two reasons why the time was ripe for such a fund. The first was a clear signal from the government health authorities that out-patient care was being prioritised over hospital stays, and secondly, while the asset category was still relatively new in Germany, it has long been an accepted asset class in the US and the UK, subject to considerably less regulation than the nursing home and managed care sector.
The new fund (whether as Luxembourger SICAV or German Spezialfonds is targeting an annual dividend payout of 5.5% to 6%, somewhere between the returns of its first two healthcare funds. The typical asset size will be between €5m and €20m, and in contrast to the earlier funds which bought assets in many rural locations, the new fund is focusing on cities with 100,000 inhabitants upwards.
