Carlyle names Europe RE head and makes £532m exit

The Carlyle Group, the Washington, DC-based private equity firm, has hired Peter Stoll, a former Blackstone senior managing director to run its European real estate business.

The hire of Stoll, following a recruitment process headed by head of international real estate Adam Metz, will see him manage the firm’s existing European portfolio and also raise a new fund. Carlyle’s former European heads Robert Hodges and Eric Sasson departed in 2011 and started RedTree Capital in 2013. RedTree struck its first deal earliert this month, a freehold office building, Le Bleriot, in Suresnes, near Paris at 1-3 Quai Dassault.

At the start of the year the firm elevated seven of its real estate professionals to senior-level positions. The promotions were part of a larger wave of 59 advancements across the company’s four investment businesses: corporate private equity; real assets; global market strategies and solutions; and investor relations.

The highest-level real estate promotion went to Andrew Chung, who was named partner. Chung previously had served as a managing director focused on US real estate acquisition opportunities since 2011.

The bolstering of its real estate capabilities comes just as the firm sold Pure Student Living, a London student accommodation business, to LetterOne Treasury Services for a total consideration of £532 million (€731 million; $817 million).

Carlyle entered the London student accommodation market in 2010 when it acquired the Highbury site with capital from its third pan-European real estate fund, Carlyle European Real Estate Partners III.

“The sale of this high quality portfolio, against a far more robust and certain economic backdrop, represents a successful result for this investment,” commented Mark Harris, managing director at Carlyle.

Pure Student Living comprises 2,170 rooms across five prime central London sites. Four of the assets, located at Highbury, Hammersmith, Bankside and City, are fully operational while the fifth facility at Whitechapel, will deliver a further 417 rooms when it completes in August 2015. The transaction has been structured to complete in two phases with the first comprising the acquisition of the four operational assets, with the deal to fully complete when Pure Whitechapel is delivered in summer 2015.