Tesco 100% owner of Forum Liberec

One of the newsy bits at CEDEM this year was confirmation that Tesco has taken over the 50% share of Forum Liberec it didn’t yet own. The retailer signed a contract to that effect back in August with co-developer Multi Development, who one suspects has other projects to sink its equity into. Details of the deal haven’t been forthcoming yet, so we can’t tell you just how much it managed to pull out of the project. At CEDEM, Tesco’s Acquisition & Development Director CR/SR David Nekovar mentioned he was planning a dozen new hypermarkets. Keeping busy, we see.

Tesco vs. the Internet

Interesting. One of the questions during the retail panel today at CEDEM CEE concerned the impact of the Internet on shopping schemes and retailers. The general answer was that so far, its  biggest effect has been on the consumer electronics market. David Nekovar of Tesco said his company was considering increasing its on-line presence, including a pick-up system, where you order on-line and then go to the store to pick up your goods.

Then we see that in the UK, Tesco could be planning to launch a price war and FT Alphaville figures this will hit on-line grocers.

Invesco shells out €37m for Panattoni’s Tesco BTS

…and we stay with logistics: Invesco Real Estate has invested €37m in a 57,000 sqm BTS scheme developed by Panattoni for Tesco. The investment is on behalf of iii-BVK Europa-Immobilien-Spezialfonds, (a real estate fund of Bayerische Versorgungskammer Invesco Real Estate has managed since 2000). The building is located next to the junction of the A1 and A4 in Gliwice and Tesco will use it to serve southern Poland. Panattoni and Invesco RE have what they call “an existing relationship”.

Bettina Knirsch, Invesco Real Estate’s Director of Fund Management said

This forward funded prime logistics property not only complements the existing assets within our client’s mandate but adds further diversification to their overall portfolio with an asset that is long-let to a good covenant tenant, providing a stable and attractive income stream.

Media watch: On Galerie Stromovka

Last week, the Czech daily Tyden took aim at Galerie Stromovka, a Tesco-anchored shopping center that would offer 12,000 sqm of retail, and 6,800 sqm of offices (Prague 7′s town hall is one of the target tenants for this space…)

Tyden took a shotgun approach to its attack, using an impressive mix of hyperbole along with some decent points as ammunition.

They pretend to be politicians, our representatives. But it seems more like someone’s sent them out to do his business. We see this in big and local politics. One example of this is the approach of Prague 7 to the construction of the huge shopping center in Holesovice. ..

And he’s just getting going…      

Deutsche Pfandbrief in €181m refinancing for Bainbridge

Deutsche Pfandbriefbank announced that it’s made a €181m facility to Bainbridge Capital Retail Properties in order to refinance 13 CEE retail properties anchored by Carrefour or Tesco. BCRP is a fund managed by AeriumGroup. Five of the assets, are located in the Czech Republic, four in Poland and another four in Slovakia. In all, the portfolio consists of 247,000 sqm. Aerium bought the properties from Carrefour in a sale-and-lease-back deal in 2004. Salans provided legal services to Deutsche Pfandbriefbank for the deal.

Tesco to issue mortgage bond

Tesco continues to take advantage of the confidence investors have in its cash flow. Along with selling off warehouses it occupies to institutionals, it’s now set to raise €1.1bn (GBP 950m) by creating a mortgage bond backed up by the income of 41 of its stores in the UK. Experts point out this isn’t your standard CMBS structure, because the assets behind the 30-year bond are all owned by a single company. The FT notes this is the fourth time the retailer has tapped the capital markets in this way in the past 18 months.

DEKA snaps up Tesco Distribution Centre

In a deal that apparently closed on Christmas Eve, and therefor counts towards the 2009 numbers, DEKA Immobilien has acquired Tesco’s 60,000 sqm distribution center just outside Prague for €36m. It has been placed in the the investors open-ended fund Deka-ImmobilienEuropa. DEKA did a similar sale and leaseback arrangement with Tesco in Warsaw last summer. Cushman & Wakefield acted for Tesco in that case as well, just as it did in a separate deal in Hungary in which WP Carey bought Tesco’s distribution center.

Tesco sells €500m worth of CMBS in UK

Just as quickly as Tesco raised half a billion euro through a CMBS issuance, experts warned people not to expect this to be a golden bullet for the property market’s liquidity issues. Tesco essentially sold bonds supported by the rental income the company will make from 12 of its UK stores and two distribution centers. The bonds, which mature in 2039, carry a coupon of 7.6 percent and were priced a gilts plus 330 bps.

Royal Bank of Scotland analyst Michael Cox said the deal was reminiscent of “the old days before the explosion in CMBS,” when long term, amortizing deals issuing fixed-rate bonds to a generally more stable UK investor base, were the norm.

“In these sort of deals, the real estate is less important than the tenant. I can certainly see more of these deals done in the near future, but I do not expect the more traditional floating-rate multi-loan deals to return anytime soon,” Cox said.

Tesco deal on the way?

A major investment deal for Tesco’s CEE logistics properties is apprently still under negotiation, though when exactly that transaction will go through remains to be seen.

Cushman & Wakefield is thought to be involved in Budapest, but is resolutely close-lipped when asked for details. From other sources, we hear that American investment management company W. P. Carey is interested in the Hungarian portion, while Germany’s Deka Immobilien Investment is thought to be looking at the Polish and Czech portfolio. If the company’s Slovak assets ever actually were part of the deal, that no longer seems to be the case.

When, or rather if the deal goes through (after all, there’s still that yawning gap between buyers and sellers), it’s hoped it will create a major stimulus on the market. Perhaps nowhere more so than in Hungary, where last year’s investment volume was a paltry €411m.