ING provides €72.5m to refinance GreenOak’s Spanish logistics

ING Real Estate Finance Spain and Portugal has provided a €72.5 million loan to GreenOak Real Estate to refinance a portfolio of Spanish logistics properties.

The bilateral loan has a term of five years and will refinance seven properties. ING acted as the sole lender in the deal.

GreenOak is the principal investment firm founded by John Carrafiell and two former Morgan Stanley real estate colleagues.

The firm has been active in Spain in recent years. Last June, it announced that it had compiled a Spanish logistics platform with five Madrid-area properties purchased and further three in exclusivity. By November, the firm said that it owned nine logistics properties in the Madrid area comprising 200,000 square metres of occupied space. The firm also established a dedicated team to focus on the Spanish logistics sector.

“Logistics is an asset class where scale and expertise makes a difference,” Carrafiell said last June. “We are focused on Spain – it’s where we have our strongest conviction. Because of our dedicated resources for investments in the sector, our team on the ground and our proprietary approach to completing due diligence, GreenOak can close individual asset transactions quickly, as only a sector specialist can – whether the investment is €5 million or €100 million.”

GreenOak’s Spain-focussed Continental European Private Equity Real Estate Fund had its final closing in July 2015, hitting its hard cap of €250 million. With leverage targeted at 65 percent, the firm said that it had more than €700 million of investment capacity for Spain.

In July 2014, Deutsche Bank financed the €160 million acquisition by GreenOak and Grupo Lar of eight Spanish retail assets with a €100 million loan. The assets were sold by Dutch-listed retail group Vastned.