Berlin Hyp provides €70m for Dutch office portfolio

German mortgage bank Berlin Hyp has provided a €70 million loan to refinance a portfolio of offices located in the Netherlands.

The seven-year loan has been provided to the Dutch arm of Luxembourg-listed investor and asset manager Fotex.

The financing is secured by 11 office buildings located in city centre and business park locations around the country. The bulk of the portfolio is located in the Randstad region, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht.

Berlin Hyp is understood to be one of the incumbent lenders to assets within the portfolio, having previously written a loan secured by some of the properties. However, the bank’s exposure to Fotex’s Dutch real estate portfolio has increased by more than 100 percent with this latest financing.

The 70,000 square metre portfolio is fully let, with the majority leased to public sector tenants including the Government Buildings Agency of the Netherlands. Other tenants include accountant BDO, cosmetics brand L’Oreal and Dutch DIY retailer Praxis. The portfolio will be managed by asset manager APF International.

Fotex began in 1984 as a Hungarian-American photo processing company, before diversifying over the subsequent decades. Fotex Netherlands was founded in 2009 and bought office buildings in the cities of Zoetermeer, Gorichem, Amsterdam and Rotterdam the same year.

In its interim results published earlier this week, Berlin Hyp announced that it wrote €4.1 billion of new business during the first three quarters of the year, a slight year-on-year increase, despite what it described as “challenging” underlying conditions.