EPI Special Opportunities 4 (EPISO 4), the opportunity fund advised by pan-European real estate investment manager Tristan Capital Partners, has sold three neighbourhood shopping centres in the Netherlands for a total of approximately €100m. The disposals come six months after the purchase of the properties by the fund, which were originally part of the Delta Lloyd portfolio.
The properties are the Piazza Centre in Gorinchem, the city 35km south east of Rotterdam; Brusselse Poort in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht and Centrumplan in Geleen, near Maastricht. The €273m Delta Lloyd portfolio purchase was one of last year’s largest retail real estate investment deals in the Netherlands. This followed an earlier acquisition by a Tristan-advised fund, with Timeless Investments, of a mixed portfolio of 39 Dutch assets from Generali in September 2015.
Details of the sales achieved are as follows:
- A private investment vehicle, affiliated with Dreef Beheer BV, acquired the Piazza Center in Gorinchem, which was renovated in 2003. The property is a well-performing neighbourhood centre with 11,950m² GLA and high quality tenants in its 42 retail units.
- The older Brusselse Poort centre in Maastricht was acquired by HB Capital, the independent investment company of the Blokker family. The property provides 19,690m² of space divided into 55 stores, which are fully occupied. The centre is anchored by supermarket chain Albert Heijn and attracts high footfall from the surrounding, mainly residential, catchment area of western central Maastricht.
- Intown Geleen BV, affiliated with PBM Construction Germany GmbH, purchased the Centrumplan in Geleen, which was built in 2008. The 12,172m² building is in the centre of the town, which is near a major intersection of the North-South Netherlands motorway, with the highway connecting Brussels and Antwerp to Cologne in Germany.
Ben Newman, Managing Director Portfolio and Asset Management at Tristan Capital Partners, said: “The sale of these three non-core assets was part of our original business plan for the portfolio. We will now focus on larger properties, predominantly in the Randstad area, which have a greater value-add component that we can unlock through active asset management and repositioning.”
The Randstad region in the western centre of the Netherlands is a conurbation that encompasses the country’s four largest cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.
Sectie5 is local partner and asset manager for all three properties. CBRE advised EPISO 4 on the Gorinchem and Maastricht transactions and Houthoff were the legal advisors. Cushman & Wakefield acted as advisor on behalf of the three individual buyers.
