PARIS—AXA Real Estate Investment Managers, has made the first acquisitions on behalf of the recently launched UK Long Lease Property Fund, with the purchase of two supermarkets for around £38 million in aggregate. The Fund has acquired a supermarket let to Waitrose on the High Street in Sevenoaks, Kent, for £11.5 million, and a 56,800 square foot supermarket let to Tesco in Mickleover, Derby, for £26.3 million.
AXA, the leading real estate portfolio and asset manager in Europe1, with over €43 billion of assets under management as at September 2012, announces that it has made the first acquisitions on behalf of the recently launched UK Long Lease Property Fund, with the purchase of two supermarkets for around £38 million in aggregate. The Fund has acquired a supermarket let to Waitrose on the High Street in Sevenoaks, Kent, for £11.5 million, and a 56,800 square foot supermarket let to Tesco in Mickleover, Derby, for £26.3 million.
“To be able to announce the completion of two high quality acquisitions so shortly after the launch of the new fund demonstrates AXA's ability to put its extensive transaction network in the UK to effective use in sourcing suitable investment opportunities for its clients,” said John Osborn, fund manager at AXA. “Both of the assets we have acquired fit precisely into the Fund's strategy of investing in properties with strong property fundamentals that are capable of generating secure, long term income streams with rental uplifts
“We have a strong pipeline of suitable investment opportunities across a broad range of sectors which we are currently assessing, while, in parallel, we continue to expand the Fund's investor base.”
The acquisitions, which come shortly after AXA's launch of the new, open-ended UK Long Lease Property Fund, having raised an initial £125 million, are in line with Fund's strategy of building a core portfolio of UK long lease assets, with a focus on strong property fundamentals, by targeting investments across a range of sectors from traditional to more alternative assets. This strategy is expected to generate long term, stable income streams often with inflation indexation for institutional investors that are looking for investments with liability matching attributes, in particular pension schemes. AXA Real Estate is targeting a total fund size of around £1 billion in five years.
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David Phillips
David Phillips is a Chicago-based freelance writer and consultant with more than 20 years experience in business and community news. He also has extensive reporting experience in the food manufacturing industry for national trade publications.
