TIAA Henderson Real Estate in £200m loan hat trick

TIAA Henderson Real Estate’s lending business has completed three UK loans totalling £200m, Real Estate Capital can reveal.

The largest is a £100m, 20-year, fixed rate loan for parent company TIAA-CREF to refinance Orbit Developments’ Middlebrook park in Bolton.

The asset, which includes 646,500 sq ft of retail and leisure space, and 266,000 sq ft of office and industrial space, is the north of England’s second largest shopping park.

The TIAA-CREF mandate also provided an £85m senior, seven-year, fixed-rate, interest-only loan, at a 63% loan-to-value ratio, to refinance three prime central London office and retail properties for a Middle Eastern borrower.

TH Real Estate’s second capital pool, for shorter-term financing, comes from its debt fund, which is targeting £500m of equity and was seeded with £100m from TIAA-CREF in October.

The fund lent a UK listed property company about £15m to refinance a west London student housing asset, with a five-year, part fixed and part floating-rate loan at a 74% LTV ratio. THRE plans to retain the fixed-rate mezzanine portion for the fund and syndicate the 55% LTV ratio, floating rate, senior portion.

TH Real Estate can provide loans of four to 20 years with leverage up to 75% LTV. As well as providing bilateral loans it can also participate in club transactions.

Christian Janssen (pictured), head of real estate debt at TH Real Estate said: “We are very pleased to have established the UK debt platform and closed this series of investments, leveraging TH Real Estate’s comprehensive real estate research, equity and debt capabilities.”

Christoph Wagner, director of debt strategies at TH Real Estate, added: “These financings fit precisely within our current UK strategy of providing sponsors with attractive funding solutions for their borrowing requirements in London and regional UK property markets. The diversity of our capital base allows us to target prime assets in core locations and also finance secondary properties in locations that are relatively undersupplied by lenders in the current market.”

Shawn Kaufman, director of debt strategies, said: “We will continue to expand the TH Real estate lending platform throughout the course of 2015 and work with borrowers, co-lenders and syndication partners to meet the changing requirements of the rapidly evolving UK market.”