Morgan Stanley’s Real Estate Fund IV (MSREF) has set up a joint venture with Spain’s Lar Sol to develop housing on Spain’s coasts.
The 50/50 Lar Sol MS joint venture plans to invest €500m over the next five years, with a focus on second homes. Its first projects will be at Costa Blanca on the eastern coast, and on the Costa del Sol. Lar Sol, created in 2003, is a unit of Spanish property company Grupo Lar.
Stephane Theuriau, head of Morgan Stanley’s European real estate investing business, said Spain’s holiday and second home market is “especially attractive”.
The first project is a 155-home scheme on the Costa Blanca, valued at €43m. The scheme, which is close to Alicante’s golfing attractions, will be built in two phases, of 78 and 77 homes; work on the first phase will start this month and the first homes will be completed in 2007. Lar Sol will manage and market the houses.
Grupo Lar has a variety of joint ventures with international companies, including a €200m Spanish industrial development programme in partnership with industrial specialist iOG and UK property firm Grosvenor. The venture, io Lar Grosvenor, is developing multi-tenanted industrial estates of between 15,000m² and 35,000m² across Spain.
Meanwhile, last December MSREF IV and German property company Corpus Immobiliengruppe teamed up to buy a €2.1bn portfolio of 48,000 homes in the Rhein-Ruhr area from German industrial conglomerate ThyssenKrupp.
