European sale & leaseback fund sources €132m from DekaBank

Gramercy Property Europe, the sale and leaseback investment fund, has financed a German logistics portfolio with a €131.6 million loan underwritten and arranged by DekaBank.

The loan, which is said to be at a “conservative Day 1 LTV”, is in line with the strategy of Anni Hoenicke, Deka’s global head of real estate lending, who told Real Estate Capital in August that the bank wanted to add more logistics loans to its book, as well as more retail and hotels.

In the last few years, the German bank has been particularly successful lending on city offices.

Headed by Alistair Calvert, Gramercy Europe manages the fund and is a subsidiary of US listed REIT Gramercy Property Trust which has a total portfolio of 44 million square feet across North America and Europe, the majority in industrial and logistics.

The European fund’s 10 million square foot European portfolio, which it gears at 40-50 percent LTV, is valued at over €600 million. Its assets are in the Netherlands, France, Poland and the UK as well as Germany.

Amar Latif, head of Deka’s lending activities in Germany, said: “Gramercy is an established global operator in the logistics sector, and this is the bank’s first financing in Germany for them.”

The portfolio financed was acquired from Goodman and Gramercy PT and includes eight German properties completed between 2008 and 2012 totalling 391,000 square metres, in locations including Koblenz, Graben, Bodenheim and Bremen. All the assets are fully let, and in July, when Gramercy Europe consolidated its ownership in the assets, 60 percent of the income was from Amazon.

Deka aims to write about €2.5 billion of new business a year across its key markets: Germany, North America, the UK & Ireland, Germany, France and Italy.

The bank plans to sell “a small part” of the Gramercy loan to in-house debt fund Deka Realkredit Klassik and to hold the rest for the time being.

Deka is also providing additional finance for the Gramercy fund for a ninth logistics building in the same portfolio, which is in Lille, France and which completed in 2013.