Le mie ricette per la real estate communityRLI investors (RLI), a German asset manager and fund manager specialising in logistics real estate, just acquired a logistics complex in North Rhine-Westphalia for the open-ended real estate special AIF “RLI Logistics Fund – Germany I”. The property is located in Hückelhoven in the County of Heinsberg and thus in the Rhine-Ruhr metro region, close to the Cologne/Bonn conurbation in the south-east and the Duisburg/Ruhr conurbation in the north-east. It is let long-term to parcel service provider Hermes Germany, which operates one of its six (and in future 15) Germany hubs at the site while also using it to handle its entire shipping business out of the central warehouse of shopping TV retails QVC Deutschland directly next to the subject property.
With a volume of around EUR 40 million, the acquisition counts among the larger single transactions on the German logistics market in recent months. “Take the location, building quality, or tenancy situation – all key aspects of the property are premium, and we are very pleased to have secured this asset for our investors,” said Bodo Hollung, Managing Director of RLI. “It is another demonstration of our strong transaction performance as one of the biggest investors on the German logistics real estate market at this time.”
Expanded and modernised as recently as 2016, the logistics complex has a gross lettable area of around 14,300 square metres, and is located in a trading estate within the city limits of Hückelhoven. The property is superbly connected to the Rhine-Ruhr metro areas (Düsseldorf, Cologne) in the east and the Netherlands and Belgium west of it via the B57 federal route and the A46 motorway. In 2017, the third and final section linking the A46 with the Dutch motorway network between Gangelt-Vinteln and the motorway junction Heinsberg is scheduled to be completed, so that the site will benefit moreover from convenient access to the BeNeLux countries, most notably to the Dutch and Belgian deep-sea ports.
The asset was sold by Casaplan Group, an owner-operated investor company based in Saarbrücken which raised the distribution hub in 2007 and expanded it in 2016. The transaction was facilitated by BNP Paribas Real Estate GmbH with an investment team specialising in logistics and industrial properties.
“The fourth quarter of 2016 was very dynamic for us, and we expect things to continue along the same lines this year,” said Hollung. “We completed several other acquisitions, have the next transactions in the pipeline, and will have more to report on these shortly. The intense effort of recent months, and above all the continuous networking with property developers and logistics operators, are increasingly paying off. In fact, they are the foundation on which we managed to establish ourselves as a major player on Germany’s logistics real estate market within a period of barely two years.”
Source : Company