M&G Real Estate has established a new UK capital markets origination team to handle big-ticket transactions, as the fund house anticipates a rise in more complex dealmaking.
The firm has promoted investment director Hugo Henkes to head of UK origination, working with UK origination director James Cooke, who was previously an investment manager at the firm. Supported by an analyst on rotation, the team will focus on deals of larger lot sizes, spearheading more complex acquisitions on behalf of internal funds and external capital.
Henkes will report to Chris Perkins (pictured), who has a new role as head of UK capital markets, overseeing the capital markets origination team and UK investment activity.
Perkins told EG that the formation of the team signals a growing expectation that larger, more complicated deals will be likely as the market moves past the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit.
“As we re-emerge from Covid, it’s a more rarefied market when you operate at scale,” Perkins said. “It’s a market that we have good experience in.
“We have concluded very large transactions – the capital value of 40 Leadenhall Street, EC3, when it’s done will be close on £1.5bn. We’ve done placemaking, transformational regeneration schemes like Haymarket in Edinburgh and Snow Hill in Birmingham. It’s scale of that nature that we would look to do more of. It’s a market in which there is a real chance to move the dial.”
The formation of the origination division has also seen a shift in the set-up of the wider team. Sector specialists in retail & leisure and offices and industrials have previously worked as either investment managers or asset managers. The revamp has amalgamated those roles into portfolio asset managers, reporting to head of UK portfolio asset management John Duxbury.
The new origination team will work closely with the portfolio asset management division, and Perkins said those sector specialists will continue to be involved in the larger deals as well as more traditional transactions.
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