REIT's 50-50 JV Placing Bet on Central Europe

ADDISON, TX-Using a 50-50 partnership with a UK-based fund, Behringer Harvard Opportunity REIT I Inc. has swung open the door to Central Europe. The opening act is a buy-in to a 15-property retail-and-industrial portfolio and a hardy pipeline to continue fueling an assembly of institutional-quality assets.

The deal is an expansion of locally based Behringer Harvard’s ties to Hunter Property Fund Management Ltd. of Edinburgh, England, the portfolio manager of the St. Wenceslas Property Fund. The portfolio’s size isn’t available, but it is mostly retail with the heaviest concentration in Prague, Jason Mattox, Behringer Harvard’s executive vice president, tells GlobeSt.com. Other properties are located in Warsaw, Gdynia, also in Poland, and Brno in the Czech Republic, with their European Union pushes underwriting the REIT’s investment strategy.

“We’re betting on these economies largely,” Mattox says. “You have growth in these economies that’s considerably faster than Western Europe and they’re now becoming part of formal Europe.”