ARTICLES LABELLED WITH TAG investment

spaceOS has announced a new capital raise totalling €2.5 million. The latest funding comes after Austrian commercial real estate group Immofinanz took a €2 million stake in spaceOS, further strengthening the firms’ partnership, following a deal in December to roll-out the spaceOS platform across the group’s entire portfolio. Existing investors BeyondBuild also contributed an additional €0.5 million to this funding round.

Resolution Property (based in the UK, a member of the Fosun Group, a major Chinese conglomerate and investment company) and Zeus Capital Management (a leading international real estate investment and asset management firm) have recently acquired Floreasca Park, a ca. 40,000 sqm office campus in the heart of Bucharest. The property was sold to the joint venture by a fund managed by GLL Real Estate Partners GMBH (a member of Macquarie Group).

Savills Investment Management has acquired another logistics unit in Łódź. The property was purchased from Invesco Real Estate, the global real estate investment manager, on behalf of the Savills IM European Logistics Fund 2 (ELF 2), which now owns 26 properties in Europe.

Elite Partners Capital has acquired a warehouse in Mszczonów, Poland for more than €30 million from a subsidiary of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. The transaction spearheads its build-up of a portfolio of specialised logistics assets in Europe to address opportunities arising from COVID-19-related disruptions.

New European hotel transaction data from Cushman & Wakefield reveals that the first half of 2020 saw a marked increase in investors retreating to their home regions amid COVID-19 related uncertainty, with 78% of the recorded €5.7 billion in transactions (a year-on-year fall of 55%) originating from within Europe.

CPI Property Group announced the acquisition of Concept Tower office in Warsaw, Poland. Concept Tower represents CPIPG’s 14th office property in Warsaw. The Group is now the largest owner of offices in Warsaw by GLA, with a portfolio of 314,000 square metres.

AFI Europe, the owner of among others the largest mall in Bucharest, has completed the takeover of the portfolio consisting of four office projects from NEPI Rockcastle, in the most important office transaction in Romanian history. With a value of €307 million, the transaction through which NEPI Rockcastle, advised by Colliers International, sold four office projects to AFI Europe represents a third of the real estate investment market estimated at about €1 billion in 2020. The acquisition places Romania on the map of large strategic investors and has the potential to become a catalyst for significant new transactions in the future, being an important benchmark for local market liquidity and contributing to increasing investor confidence, according to Colliers International specialists.

CC Trust Group AG, a family office owned by the Swiss serial entrepreneur Claudio Cisullo, and Romanian property developer One United Properties, owned by local entrepreneurs Victor Căpitanu and Andrei Diaconescu, have launched a global private equity firm in Switzerland.

The coronavirus crisis has led to a significant shift in the investment strategies of institutional real estate investors. “Lower risk, lower return” is the mantra of the moment. 58% of the 150 professional investors in Germany, France and the UK surveyed by Union Investment for its investment climate study are currently pursuing such a strategy. The figure was just 35% prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. The shift is especially pronounced in the UK, where security is the main investment motive for 79% of those surveyed. Before the pandemic, it was 50%. Nonetheless, there is no general reluctance to invest. Only five% of the European investors in the survey intend to avoid all investment in real estate in the current phase.

The first half of this year saw an absolute record-breaking result in the history of the Polish investment market in the warehouse segment. For the office sector, it was the second-best six months in history in terms of transaction value. Despite the turmoil caused by COVID-19, total transaction volume in the commercial real estate sector in Poland in the first half of this year was even higher than the excellent result from the same period in 2019, according to Walter Herz.