Lloyds Banking Group has reduced its UK “bad book” by £2.5bn in the first six months of this year through consensual agreements with customers, loans sales and asset disposals. In its half year results released today it said the portfolio “continues to reduce significantly ahead of expectations” and that, subject to rounding, that the UK […]
Pricoa Mortgage Capital has completed its first deal in Germany. The commercial mortgage lending arm of Prudential Finance has provided Hines Global REIT with a €36m facility to purchase a 56,500 sq m logistics property in Forchheim near Nuremburg. The building is fully let to third party logistics provider Simon Hegele. Around 20,000 sq m […]
Deutsche Bank, HIG’s Bayside Capital and private equity firm AnaCap Financial Partners have together acquired a €495m non-performing and underperforming loan portfolio backed by Romanian property in one of the first examples of loan buyers moving outside overcrowded European markets. The portfolio consists of 3,566 non-performing and under-performing loans secured against residential, retail and other commercial […]
Westfield launched a £750m securitisation today to refinance a £550m loan secured on Stratford City Shopping Centre, which will be the lowest priced European CMBS debt issued since the financial crisis.
Advised by Deutsche Bank and Crédit Agricole and as revealed by Real Estate Capital (1.6.2014), the Australian shopping centre giant decided to refinance the flagship London mall via a CMBS, and the issue is expected to be priced substantially below 100 bps according to one source. It is an agency CMBS meaning a Westfield vehicle rather than the two banks is the issuer; Westfield is also acting on behalf of the centre's joint venture owners.
The existing loan to be refinanced was taken out in 2011 and was thought to have been priced somewhere between 205 and 250 basis points over Libor - a keen margin at the time reflecting the quality of the asset and the sponsors. The previous lowest priced European CMBS since the crisis was the AAA tranche (up to 19% LTV) of the €1.07bn Taurus-2013, which priced at 105bps and was issued in May last year by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, held against a €2bn multi-family German residential portfolio owned by Gagfah.
The £750m single loan collateralising Statford City Shopping Centre No 1 however, is a single tranche, AAA CMBS representing a 38.4% loan-to-value based on a May 2014 valuation of Stratford City by CBRE of c £1.95bn.
It expected that take-up for the five-year CMBS agency loan will come around 60% from the UK with the remainder from Europe and the US.
The loan will refinance the £550m facility put in place in 2011 arranged by Crédit Agricole, HSBC and Eurohypo, which held one-third and syndicated the remainder to Aareal Bank, AXA REIM, Bayern LB, MetLife, Credit Foncier, Deutsche Pfandbriefbank and Santander. The refinancing will allow Westfield and its JV partners to take around £2o0m out of the asset, although around £70m could be used towards an extension and investment into the centre.
The 1.9m sq ft complex is owned by Westfield alongside partners Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Dutch pension fund manager APG. Marketing of the deal will begin this week with pricing expected at the end of the month or the beginning of next month. The centre currently has a 98.9% occupancy rate and a 6.6 years average unexpired lease term to first break.
Deutsche Bank is financing the €160m acquisition of eight Spanish retail assets for GreenOak Real Estate and Grupo Lar in a further sign of lender interest picking up in Spain. The ticket size is believed to be around €100m and the German bank is understood to have beaten several other investment banks to win the […]
Crédit Agricole CIB has syndicated a significant portion of the £77m of debt it issued for Perella Weinberg’s purchase of One Poultry in the City, to AXA. The French insurer is thought to have taken at least a 50% participation in the three-year senior loan, equating to a position of about £40m. Perella paid £110m for […]
Wells Fargo Bank has provided a $311.8m loan to finance part of the The Howard Hughes Corporation’s Downtown Summerlin project in Las Vegas, Nevada. The three-year loan has an initial maturity date of 15 July, 2017, with two one-year extensions and an initial interest rate of one-month LIBOR plus 2.25%. The loan will be used […]
Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Metropolitan Life have acquired $475m of mezzanine debt as part of a refinancing of five Kyo-ya Hotels & Resorts in Hawaii and California.
CPPIB through its CPPIB Credit Investments II vehicle has bought a $300m junior mezzanine (B) loan at Libor plus 6.6% secured on the hotels, while MetLife invested in a $175m senior mezzanine (A) loan with a Libor plus 4.5% interest rate.
The Hawaiian hotels – Sheraton Waikiki, Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa, Westin Moana Surfrider and The Royal Hawaiian – and The Palace Hotel (San Francisco) have a combined 4,016 rooms.
The hotels were refinanced by Deutsche Bank via its New York-based German American Capital Corporation subsidiary. GACC was the originator and mortgage loan seller, while the Japanese Kyo-ya Hotels & Resorts is the borrower. A two-year, floating-rate loan with three one-year extension options, secured by the fee and/or leasehold interests in the full-service hotels was securitised as COMM 2014-KYO and, in addition to the first mortgage loan, GACC originated the two mezzanine loans on the deal.
Deutsche Bank priced the $551m top slice of the seven-tranche $1.4bn CMBS deal at Libor plus 90 basis points, with S&P and Morningstar rating it AAA. The quality and location of the properties, positive operating trends and strong Hawaiian tourism were among the strengths listed by the agencies in presale reports. The hotels operate under three different Starwood-affiliated brands: Westin, Sheraton, and The Luxury Collection.
The issue is the second refinancing of the portfolio in just over a year; in 2013 Goldman Sachs issued a $1.1bn CMBS, GSMS 2013-KYO, backed by most of the same collateral.
In an unsolicited commentary on the latest deal, Fitch said that the top tranche rating was consistent with its own AAA rating, but that it “likely” would have assigned subordinate ratings to subordinate tranches, because of the $300m of additional debt that has been tacked on, even though 1,142-room Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, the weakest property in the GSMS 2013-KYO pool, does not feature in the current issue.
“The increase in total debt and the reduction in supporting collateral should give investors pause,” the Fitch report stated, calling the additional debt part of a “troubling trend” among US CMBS lenders.
Fitch's maximum leverage for a 'B-' rating is 80.5% which would allow $1.159bn of debt, and a spokesperson would elaborate only by saying that the LTV on $1.4bn would be materially higher.
S&P acknowledged that at an 82.6% LTV based on its valuation, the loan is “highly leveraged” and “higher than most single-borrower transactions we have rated recently.” With the mezzanine debt, the LTV increases to 110.6%.
“We are aware of the risks Fitch highlighted and factored them into our analysis, but disagree with their conclusions,” a spokesperson for S&P said. “There have been numerous occasions where we believed that the risks were greater than our competitors did but we think the market benefits from a diversity of opinions on credit risk.”
BNP Paribas has cemented a comprehensive return to European property lending with its first sole UK underwrite this year, for Tisman Speyer. The French bank is financing Tishman’s £210m purchase of The Point in London’s Paddington Basin redevelopment area. The 232,772 sq ft, grade A office building is an investment for Tishman’s open-ended European core, […]
Aviva Commercial Finance has provided its first social housing loan – a 25-year, £67m facility loan for Sapphire Extra Care. The debt will be used to construct and maintain 390 social housing units targeted at the over 55s in Stoke on Trent in the UK. The Sapphire consortium, comprising the Eric Wright Group, Kajima Partnerships […]