David Hatcher

Helical Bar has secured an £81m debt facility from Aviva Commercial Finance to refinance a trio of assets in the UK. The 10-year loan allows for drawdowns of up to 63% of value and have a fixed interest rate of 2.48%. The assets are two office buildings in London – the 150,000 sq ft Shepherd’s Building in Shepherd’s Bush and the 35,000 sq ft One King Street in Hammersmith - as well as a retail asset within its 250,000 sq ft Morgan Quarter in Cardiff.

TIAA Henderson Real Estate and its joint venture partner Madison Realty has refinanced The Houndsditch Estate in the City of London with a new £120m debt facility. ING and Santander jointly provided the five-year loan. The finance reflects a loan-to-value of 60% on its £200m value.

ING has lent TH Real Estate €85m to refinance a designer outlet mall in Italy The five-year loan is secured against the fund manager’s Serravalle Designer Outlet, located just outside of Milan. The asset is Italy’s first and largest designer outlet, comprising over 38,000 sq m. It is owned by the €1.5bn European Outlet Mall Fund.

Cerberus has purchased non-performing real estate loan portfolios from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Australia Bank (NAB) totalling £6bn, it was announced today. The £4.8bn par value portfolio acquired from RBS is made up of Irish commercial real estate loans collateralised by 5,000 assets, said a source close to the deal according to Real Estate Capital's sister publication PDI. A small portion of the portfolio is made up of loans to buy-to-let investors and around 25 percent is tied to assets in Northern Ireland with the remainder in the Irish state.

Real Estate Capital has launched its first annual awards to recognise the best deals and firms active in the real estate debt markets during 2014 both in the US and Europe. After looking back over 2014, we made our pick of the firms and the deals that made headlines in what turned out to be the busiest year […]

The Bank of England’s stress testing of the UK banking system has exposed The Co-operative Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide’s real estate loan books as being the most volatile in the case of a severe economic downturn. In the hypothetical scenario created by the Bank of England, which included a 30% drop in commercial real estate values, it was expected that the Co-operative Bank – the only bank to fail the broader stress test - would have to write off 19.1% of the value of its loans, Nationwide 16.3% and Lloyds 16.1%.

M&G Investments’ real estate finance team has deployed £2bn of capital in Europe in 2014. The figure illustrates the institution’s established presence in the European real estate lending market, rivaling some of the largest banks in the sector.

Deutsche Pfandbriefbank has lent fund manager Orchard Street Investment Management £47.75m, secured against St Andrew’s Retail Park in Hull. The five-year loan reflects a 50% loan-to-value on the £95.55m purchase price. The 327,000 sq ft asset was bought from Threadneedle Investments in September. The purchase price implies a net initial yield of 6.1%.

New lending to UK real estate is up nearly 50%, hitting its highest level since 2008 according to De Montfort University’s half-year Commercial Property Lending Report. The report, which covers the six months to June 2014, showed that new lending totalled £19.6bn in the first half of this year. This was a 46.3% increase on the same period last year when £13.4bn was lent.