M7 Real Estate, the pan-European real estate investor and asset manager, announces it has completed a number of early sales of non-core assets in the Netherlands for €27.6m, in accordance with its business plan. These sales de-risk M7’s core portfolios and enable greater focus on managing and driving value from higher quality office and industrial assets.
The assets comprise a total of 64,640m² and were acquired by M7 for a variety of different mandates between June 2014 and June 2016. Since then, M7 has employed a number of strategies to crystallise a substantial uplift in the value of the assets, including a tactical disposal programme that saw several of them recycled shortly after acquisition, with others subject to extensive asset management initiatives prior to disposal.
The assets were sold in separate transactions to purchasers which include local real estate developers, individual private investors, occupier companies, office space providers and residential conversion specialists.
The largest disposal was Waldorpstraat, a 17,000m² office building in The Hague, which was sold within M7’s first month of ownership, followed by Parlevinkerweg 1, a 3,100m² office complex in Venlo, a small municipality in the south east of the Netherlands, which has been sold to a local developer.
Remko Dickhaut, Managing Director of M7 in the Netherlands said: “These sales demonstrate M7’s capacity as an asset and investment manager to identify opportunities to create value for our investors. There continues to be strong investor demand in the Netherlands for Dutch real estate, particularly for secondary assets, which provides us with the opportunity to use our local knowledge and contacts to effectively recycle capital and generate significant returns through the disposal of non-core assets.”
