The logistics park with a lettable area of 214,000 square meters is located at the entrance to the Bucharest-Pitesti highway, close to the Hornbach do-it-yourself and kika furniture stores. Its current owner is Austria’s CA Immo, which got it in 2011 and is now valuing it at about EUR120 million, according to its latest financial reports.
“The negotiations over the sale of the project to PointPark have reached an advanced stage and the deal could be signed by yearend,” ZF’s sources said.
CA Immo got the logistics park after buying another Austrian group, Europolis, which in 2004 took an active role in the development of the park started by Italy’s Cefin.
PointPark Properties and CA Immo would not comment on the information.
This spring, Ian Worboys, chief executive officer of PointPark Properties, said his company would soon be buying logistics projects in the main cities of Romania such as Bucharest, Timisoara and in other areas.
Europolis Logistic Park is the largest such park near Bucharest and tenants include big names in the retail and fast-moving consumer goods industries such as Carrefour, Altex, Profi, eMag and Macromex and in the distribution and logistics business such as Interbrands, FM Logistic, OTZ, E. van Wijk and Tibbett Logistics.
The park would also make an interesting target because of its development potential, considering CA Immo owns land next to it, which could be used for building an additional about 165,000 square meters of storage space.
Europolis Logistic Park is 96%-97% rented, according to CA Immo data, which means it is doing better than the area average, so it only has about 7,000 square meters to 8,000 square meters of vacant space. Rent in the area is EUR3.5 to EUR4 per square meter and the other owners of logistics space of over 100,000 square meters each there are Portland Trust, Prologis and Valad.
If it comes through, the sale of Europolis to PointPark would be CA Immo’s second deal this year, after the sale of 8,200 square meters on Barbu Vacarescu Street in northern Bucharest to businessman Ionut Dumitrescu.
CA Immo has a real estate portfolio valued at about EUR400 million in Romania, which generates more than EUR30 million revenue from rent. Its most visible properties are business centers Europe House, Opera Center, Bucharest Business Park and Riverplace Semanatoarea. These buildings have a lettable area of more than 100,000 square meters, which makes CA Immo one of the biggest office space owners in Bucharest.
PointPark Properties was founded in Prague in 2001 and has changed hands several times ever since. Its current owners are TPG and Ivanhoe Cambridge. TPG Capital is a US private equity fund with $66 billion assets, which wanted to bid for Romania’s largest bank, BCR, together with Citibank more than a decade ago. Ivanhoe Cambridge is a Canadian real estate company, whose assets stood at more than CAD40 billion last year.
PointPark Properties operates in both Western and Eastern Europe and owns more than 2.4 million square meters of logistics space.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)