Blackstone’s Logicor has entered exclusive negotiations with Immofinanz Group to buy the Vienna and Warsaw-listed company’s entire €573m (£417.4m) logistics portfolio.
Immofinanz owns assets in Russia and has been hit hard by instability in the country as well as general uncertainty in the European markets. As a result, it is seeking to offload its logistics assets to concentrate on retail and offices.
The LOG.IQ portfolio totals roughly 10.7m sq ft of completed assets, as well as significant development sites. The portfolio is 70% concentrated in Germany, although it also contains assets in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Russia. As of January 2015, the 59 assets in the platform were valued at €572.6m. The largest developments include the 6.5m sq ft LOG.IQ Körmend in Hungary and the 3m sq ft LOG.IQ Bucharest in Romania.
Blackstone has bid aggressively for assets in order to bulk up its logistics platform, which it is expected to sell or float next year.
When Immofinanz announced its intention to sell in August, chief executive Oliver Schumy said of the industrial market: “Our major competitors are nearly 10 times as large and this prevents us from gaining a leading position in our core region. The market is seeing a strong shift in investors’ interest to logistics properties, which is reflected in attractive prices.”
This summer, Blackstone bought €3bn of assets from Norwegian fund manager Obligo Investment Management in an off-market deal in a big push into the Nordics, with about one-third of the portfolio made up of logistics assets.
Logicor also purchased Goodman’s €300m French and German Shine portfolio in June and in April, Blackstone took on 7.7m sq ft of logistics assets in Europe through its $23bn (£15bn) purchase of the majority of GE Capital’s global real estate holdings with Wells Fargo.
