AEW and Natixis raise €400m for debt fund

Real estate asset manager AEW Europe and the asset management arm of French bank Natixis have raised more than €400 million for their second European senior property debt fund.

AEW and Natixis announced that they have reached a second close on the fund – Senior European Loan Fund II (SELF II) – with commitments raised from French and other international institutional investors.

A first close of the fund was reached during the second quarter of 2016 on €162 million. A third close is expected to occur during the first half of 2017 with a target to reach total commitments of €750 million.

The senior fund targets core assets across the main European markets, excluding the UK, with core office, retail, logistics and hotel properties preferred. The fund is understood to have a €20-50 million sweet spot for loans.

To date SELF II has secured three investments in France, Germany and Italy totalling €75 million, while four additional transactions amounting to €100 million are underway, which would bring total investments to 44 percent of the funds raised.

The partners’ first fund, SELF I, was launched in 2012 and raised €323 million. SELF I was fully invested by July 2015.

The firms said that the growth of their joint activity has led AEW and Natixis Asset Management to reinforce their dedicated real estate debt fund team, co-managed by Arnaud Heck at Natixis Asset Management and Cyril Hoyaux at AEW.

“The strengthening of our team, within the framework of the partnership set up since 2012, aims at accelerating our investment capacity. We look forward to further developing our joint debt platform in response to growing investors’ appetite for real estate debt,” said Natixis’s Heck, who is head of real estate finance.

“We are pleased with the progress made since the launch of SELF II in 2016. This new closing illustrates the attractiveness of our pan-European investment strategy, which allows us to actively select opportunities in the most dynamic real estate markets, enabling us to offer our clients the best risk adjusted returns. This second closing will bring the total funds raised by our common debt platform to close to €1 billion,” added AEW’s Hoyaux.