BAML prices Italian CMBS

Bank of America Merill Lynch has priced its €286.4m Taurus 2015-1 IT CMBS, which is secured against Italian assets.

The five-year deal has a final blended coupon of 186bps. It is rated by Fitch Ratings and DBRS. BAML will retain at least 5% in each class of notes.

The final pricing structure was as follows:

Across all tranches BAML had more than 20 different accounts in the book and the transaction was 50% oversubscribed. 79% of investors came from the UK, 10% out of the Netherlands, 6% out of Italy and the rest from other jurisdictions. 80% of investors are asset managers, 10% pension funds and insurance companies and the rest banks and hedge funds.

Retail centres owned by Blackstone and Orion Capital Managers and offices in the hands of Cerberus Capital Management make up the collateral. All three investors were early into the recovering Italian real estate market.

Last year there were 12 European deals which raised just over €4bn of finance and the market is predicting an uptick this year. It is thought that BAML may also be preparing a new CMBS of its €470m loan to refinance IVG’s The Square in Frankfurt completed earlier this month, Deutsche Bank a CMBS with Irish collateral and Citi a pan-European logistics deal.

Secured against 14 office and retail assets owned by the three sponsors, the Taurus loans have an average LTV of 62.5%, valuing the portfolio at €452.24m. The average occupancy is 87.8% with an average unexpired lease length of 3.9 years.

It follows on from Banca IMI and Cairn Capital’s €203.1m Italian deal – Tibet CMBS SRL – last week. It was secured against No 12, Via Montenapoleone, a prime retail asset in Milan. The €105m Class A tranche priced at 165bps over Euribor.