Helaba refinances Toulouse office park

Helaba has refinanced an office park in Toulouse with a €34m loan.

The deal demonstrates Helaba’s willingness to lend outside of the Paris, which dominates the French real estate market and where competition is at its greatest.

The loan has been taken out by Doughty Hanson European Real Estate Fund II against its Golf Park complex in the Basso Cambo business district. It comprises 33,000 sq m, 75% of which is office and 25% industrial space, across four properties. It is let to tenants including T-Systems, GFI Informatique and subsidiaries of Vinci, Suez and Thales.

The term of the loan is up to three years although the fund is looking to sell-off its assets and it is expected that a sale could occur before then. First the asset managers of the park, Montecristo Capital and Tivoli Capital, will be undertaking refurbishment works on vacant areas and the loan includes a €4m facility for future capital expenditure.

The business park was acquired by the fund in 2008 and has been built out in phases since. The fund is managed by Invesco, the Doughty Hanson value add team having transferred over in April last year.

Helaba said that France is one of its major target areas for real estate financing, where it has had an office for more than 20 years. It said that it was focused “on both institutional and large private investors and financings of office, retail and logistics real estate”.

The bank has completed three deals in Paris in the past few months: a €70m refinance of Tishman Speyer’s Cristalia office building in February, a €95m refinance of Quantum Global Real Estate and La Salle Investment Management’s Tour Blanche and a €280m underwrite of a debt package for a Korean investment group for its purchase of the Sanofi headquarters at 54 Rue La Boetie, both of which completed last October.