GE Real Estate bought the Pan-European portfolio, which includes UK and Swiss assets, from Capmark Bank Europe plc, a Dublin-based commercial lender in the European Union and wholly owned subsidiary of San Mateo, CA-based Capmark Financial Group Inc. The loans average "just over five years" in term, with the mix 75% retail and including "a mall or two," Michael Rowan, managing director of GE Real Estate UK, tells GlobeSt.com.
Like a previous deal, the acquisition was delivered through its pipeline of sources--and there's more to come. "We have a strong pipeline of similar transactions with a lot of different holders of loans," Rowan says. "All the ones we are looking at are performing loans that were to be securitized in CMBS and weren't."
In December 2007, GE acquired a 2.4 billion ITL [$3.8-billion USD] pool of non-performing loans in Italy and the month before picked up a £$2-billion [$3.9 billion USD]stack of performing loans from Bradford & Bingley plc. GE started this year by pushing into Germany and Japan to build a bricks-and-mortar portfolio too.
Rowan handled the November 2007 acquisition and the Capmark deal, pointing out that "nobody has brought us loans for non-performing Pan-European debt." He credits GE's global reach, with people on the ground in each country, for networking the deal flow. "I'm going to acquire as much as I possibly can if the returns are right," he says. "They all know who we are and give us a call."
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