Wereldhave fixes debt with €211m US private placement

Wereldhave, the European shopping and office specialist, has raised €211m via a US private placement.

The notes are denominated in four currencies: €120m, £35m, $US30m, $C20m,  and with an average weighted maturity of 12.3 years.

“Some of the investors didn’t want to be exposed to currency risk, so we’ve swapped them for the full duration of the notes into Euros,” said Wereldhave spokesman Richard Beentjes.

They have been swapped into fixed interest rates, at a weighted average interest cost for Wereldhave of 2.4 %, after currency and interest rate swaps.

The issue was placed with US and UK institutional investors. It is expected to close in July, but was priced on 21 May, ahead of the most recent hike in interest rates.

“We’ve secured the current low interest rates for a very long period,” said Beentjes. “We used to be a company with a high percentage of loans at variable interest rates and we’ve reduced that significantly over the past year. We’re now nearly fully fixed at historically low interest rates.”

This is the third time the Amsterdam-listed company has tapped the US private placement market. Barclays was sole agent in this transaction.

Wereldhave’s portfolio was valued at €3.2bn at end-2014, and consists of shopping centres in The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland and France and offices in Paris and Belgium. The year-end LTV was 35.4%.