Real estate investment manager GreenOak has held a final close of its second European Fund, GreenOak Europe Fund II, totalling €656 million of equity commitments and exceeding its target of €500 million.
The Euro-denominated GreenOak Europe Fund II (“Fund II”) is fully discretionary and has the ability to acquire assets in Western European countries including Spain, Italy, France, Holland, UK, Germany, Portugal and Ireland.
The Fund comprises institutional investors from North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, representing large corporate and government pension funds, endowments, foundations, and institutionally-managed family offices. In addition to Fund II’s raised €656 million of capital, GreenOak has invested or committed a further €185 million of Fund LP co-investment capital and has an additional €70 million of committed discretionary Fund LP co-investment capital to deploy into this strategy.
Fund II can acquire or develop real estate with a cost of €2.6 billion (with leverage of up to 65%) and is focusing primarily on logistics, office, and residential assets, as well as land for development. To date, the Fund and co-investors have committed over €567 million of equity across more than 20 transactions in Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands, totalling over €1.8 billion in value.
The majority of Fund II’s portfolio has been sourced and acquired off-market at discounts to market price and replacement cost and deployed in gateway cities in Europe, namely Madrid, Milan, Barcelona, Paris, as well as Europe’s key logistics nodes. Fund II’s logistics exposure reflects GreenOak’s long-running conviction towards these assets in Europe, having now acquired over 21 million square feet and €1.3bn in aggregate cost.
This close forms part of GreenOak’s growing European real estate strategy, following GreenOak Europe Fund I, which was invested between May 2015 and July 2016 exclusively in Spanish and Italian assets and has already returned 75% of its called capital having utilised only 50% leverage.
John Carrafiell, co-founder of GreenOak commented, “We are still in the middle innings of the deep-value opportunity in select European markets with motivated sellers, such as banks, insurance companies, government entities, funds winding-down and liquidity-driven sellers, driving many of our acquisitions.
“We believe our differentiated mid-market focus and direct asset and property management expertise, have established GreenOak as a reliable counterparty for sellers, lenders, developer-partners and tenants in our target markets.”
“As our investment pace has remained similarly disciplined from Fund I to Fund II, this capital-raise underscores strong institutional support for both our specific European strategy and our disciplined deployment — and importantly return — of capital for our investor partners.”
Source : Company