Patrizia continues growth with Tamar buy

Patrizia Immobilien, the Germany-based company, has taken over Tamar Capital, a London-based real estate investment management firm, to help grow its footprint in Europe.

Tamar Capital, which emerged from the collapsed Kenmore Property Group in 2009 and employs 21 people, will now transfer over to Patrizia which will also take over the management of its London-listed closed ended fund, the Tamar European Industrial Fund (TEIF). That fund, formerly the Kenmore European Industrial Fund, has around €600 million of assets across northern Europe.

The deal, which was first announced in December but has only just completed, enables Patrizia to tap into the Tamar team’s experience in deal-making across certain European markets and across the office, industrial and retail sectors.

The transaction is an example of how some firms in Europe are seeking stronger financial corporate partners in order to help sustain and grow their business. It also shows how some companies such as Patrizia, which has quadruped AUM in the last five years to €10 billion, are using capital-constrained platforms as a springboard to further growth.

“The acquisition has already offered Patrizia significant growth and investment opportunities in the UK, Ireland, France and German,” said Wolfgang Egger, chief executive officer. “Furthermore, it has extended the company’s co-investing capabilities with international opportunistic investors looking for exposure across the asset classes, particularly in the UK and Ireland,” he said.

Rob Brook, chief executive of Tamar,  said the deal would deliver “a number of good opportunities for growth”. He said: “Our current partners and clients will benefit strongly through the integration within the wider Patrizia Group, by leveraging its strong European platform, whilst Patrizia will gain greater exposure to markets and opportunities where it can quickly build its presence.”

Patrizia currently employs 600 people with 90 percent of its €10 billion portfolio managed on behalf of third-parties such as insurance companies, pension fund institutions, sovereign wealth funds and savings banks.

The firm has been on an upward trajectory of late. Among its deals was the capture of German listed residential property company, GBW, earlier this month. GBW was sold by the Bavarian Landesbank for €882 million handing Patrizia management over 32,000 residential and 300 commercial units exclusively located in Bavaria. The company won a similar auction last year when it bought a German portfolio for €1.44 billion from LBBW. For the GBW transaction, more than half of all investors were also in the LBBW deal. Other successes include taking over a €175 million asset management mandate in the Nordics where it has expanded its team.

In February this year the group  announced how it was repositioning itself to expand even further. It said it would “roll out” a new organisational structure to keep pace with the increasing in international reach of its business by becoming a “fully integrated real estate investment company”. To do that, it transferred six different operations into one company.