Florian Glock - REFIRE
Stuart Reid - Rockspring
According to Stuart Reid, senior director at Rockspring, “Following the completion of a number of asset management activities and lease extensions and considering the relative high weighting of the fund towards retail we are pleased to have exited the portfolio at an opportune time in the market to a long term investor of the quality of Warburg-HIH Invest.”
Investment manager TH Real Estate has acquired the ‘United’ portfolio comprising five retail parks for its €500m Aldomus mandate for an undisclosed sum.
The properties, which comprise around 132,000 sqm of lettable space, include three retail parks in Groß-Gerau, Leipzig and Oststeinbek near Hamburg and two hypermarket stores in Frankfurt an der Oder and Weimar, were sold by Rockspring. The properties are food anchored, with four out of five assets let to the supermarket chain Real on a long-term lease. Occupancy averages 98%.
‘The acquisition of the United portfolio represents one of the most important retail warehouse acquisitions for our team in Germany,’ Marcus Mack, fund manager at TH Real Estate, told REFIRE. ‘We’ve been looking at several German retail portfolios this year but we liked the fact that the centres here are dominant in their catchment areas and are expected to remain so. We think we will always be able to sell them at a good price.’
TH Real Estate has invested more than €350m in German retail parks this year, according to Mack and now holds €1.2b of assets across three separate mandates. ‘Our portfolio is food-anchored because it’s less influenced by the online space,’ he said.
Rockspring has been buying up ‘manage-to-core’ retail parks since 2010, according to partner Stuart Reid. ‘After successfully completing our business plans, including modernisation, branding, repositioning, signing new leases and extending existing leases, we are really pleased to have disposed of the portfolio to TH Real Estate,’ he said. ‘Our investors have benefited from our highly experienced asset management team, which has delivered exceptional returns for the funds which have held these assets.’
Rockspring previously held the properties in its TransEuropean IV and TransEuropean V funds.
MEC Metro-ECE Centermanagement GmbH & Co. KG has been instructed to take on the technical and infrastructural property management mandate. CBRE Germany acted on behalf of Rockspring. The commercial law firm Graf von Westphalen served as legal advisors to TH Real Estate and the seller was advised by K&L Gates LLP.
Retail parks have become increasingly popular this year as investors seek to boost their income from food-anchored retail. Just last month, Hamburg-based retail property group Redos Real Estate launched a new retail park fund that it intends to grow to €600m. Also last month, Redos made its first acquisition for the fund when it acquired the ‘Bordeaux’ portfolio comprising ten retail parks in Germany for around €240m from Invesco Real Estate and AEW Europe. The parks, which were developed by Hanseatische Betreuungs-und Beteiligungsgesellschaft (HBB), are located in states such as North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony.
Also last month, FTSE 250 income-focused UK REIT, Redefine International, sold its Leopard portfolio to German fund manager Patrizia Immobilien for €205m. The portfolio comprises 66 German retail properties, including stand-alone supermarkets, retail parks anchored by food stores and cash-and-carry stores totalling more than 138,000 sqm.