AXA Real Estate Investment Managers has taken control of circa €800m (£637m) of loans traded in the €4.4bn Project Octopus deal.
The global real estate manager has completed a deal to buy the Spanish commercial property loans from the joint venture partnership JP Morgan and Lone Star.
The loans acquired by AXA are all performing and come from the two-tranche €2.2bn pool of super-prime assets and performing loans bought by JP Morgan.
AXA had participated in ?the first round of bidding in the sales process of what was Eurohypo’s Spanish commercial property lending platform, being sold by Commerzbank.
It had made a solo bid for the two €2.2bn performing sub-pools, but after not progressing to the second round agreed what was a back-to-back deal to buy the loans from the investment bank and private equity jv.
JP Morgan is reported to have paid just under €2bn for its pool of loans – or the high 80 cents in the euro – as there was virtually no provisioning against the loans. The structure of the deal with AXA remains undisclosed.
Across the entire €4.4bn loan book there were between 60 to 70 borrower connections, including Hines, Alpha Real Trust Limited and Spanish property developer Bami.
The deal expands AXA’s European debt platform in Spain. Prior to this transaction it had predominantly been active in the UK, France and Germany.
In 2012 it completed the purchase of €1.2bn of nominally valued performing real estate from loans from Société Générale, predominantly secured against French and German real estate.
The insurance giant was one of the first non-bank lenders to enter the European real estate debt market in 2005, and has been actively investing in and originating debt. At the end of last year its CRE debt platform stood at €7.9bn.
It has the capacity to invest across nine European countries on behalf of around 40 insurance companies, pension funds and sovereign wealth fund investors.
bridget.o’connell@estatesgazette.com
