Aareal Property Services completes on Primavera Shopping Centre in Rome

Aareal Property Services, the Amsterdam-based asset management subsidiary of Aareal Bank, dedicated to creating and managing property investment funds for institutional investors, has completed on the purchase of the Primavera shopping centre in central Rome for their Aareal Italy Fund. The conclusion of an innovative forward purchase agreement from developer Di Veroli Group of Rome takes Aareal Property Services’ assets under management in Italy to over € 500 million, making it one of Italy’s largest foreign property investors.

The € 48 million forward purchase deal allowed Aareal Property Services to secure the fully let scheme for the Aareal Italy Fund at an initial yield in excess of 8%. Ronald ten Bokum, Managing Director of Aareal Property Services, sees this sort of transaction as essential to delivering returns for the new generation of pan-European investment vehicles Aareal Property Services pioneer. “Our investors rightly expect added value from our fund management role and that is exactly what we have done here. We have had to bring a lot to the table to secure, and more importantly, deliver this scheme, but we have worked well with Di Veroli. This hasn’t been an off-the-shelf deal but we are delighted with the result”.

The Aareal Italy Fund committed to the forward purchase of the centre at ground breaking stage in 2001 and have been heavily involved in the project throughout its development, being attracted initially by the centre’s unique positioning in one of Rome’s most populous districts. Unsurprisingly the centre is fully let at completion, anchored by Media World, Melablu, Azzurra and a Rinascente Group SMA supermarket. To secure such a prime site however the developers have had to build the entire 36,000 sq.m. scheme into a hill.

Commenting on the scheme at completion ten Bokum remarked “The centre was
always going to do well with 250,000 people within a 10 minute drive, but both we
and Di Veroli had to hold strongly to that conviction when building a shopping
centre into a hillside. I can’t understate the design hurdles we’ve had to get over
to get here, but look at the result”.

Source: Aareal Bank NV