LEADING CITIES INVEST successfully concludes another sale: open-ended real estate fund sells Pau Claris building in Barcelona

• After the sale of Pau Claris, five office properties in the city center of Barcelona remain in the portfolio
• Share of Spanish properties in the fund is now about 15 percent

KanAm Grund Group’s open-ended real estate fund LEADING CITIES INVEST (ISIN: DE0006791825) has sold the Pau Claris complex in Barcelona, Spain. The company bought the property in 2019 and was able to sell it at a profit. This is already the fifth transaction for the investment fund since the beginning of the year. Buyer is Franklin Real Asset Advisors on behalf of one of its clients. The parties agreed not to disclose the price of the deal.     

The office building comprises around 6,200 square meters. It is situated at Carrer de Pau Claris 158-160, in the heart of Barcelona, in the same district as the world-renowned Sagrada Família basilica and within just one block of Passeig de Gràcia, one of the city’s main commercial and touristic streets. There are many office complexes, residential buildings, shops, hotels and restaurants in the neighborhood. The building is let under a long-term lease to the Generalitat de Catalunya, the political administrative institution of the region of Catalonia. 

This is the fifth transaction of the Fund Management department for the LEADING CITIES INVEST since the start of the year. The light industrial property Lambda, near the German city of Chemnitz and the office complex Fab9 in Helsinki were acquired for the investment fund in March. These deals were followed by the sale of the Chiquita headquarters at Lake Geneva in Switzerland at the beginning of June. 
The last-mile logistics hall Cross Dock Upper Austria, located nearby Linz, represents the most recent addition and first purchase in the Austrian market. Almost at the same time, KanAm Grund Group has sold the Pau Claris building in the Spanish city of Barcelona.

The disposal of Pau Claris will reduce the share of Spanish properties in the fund to about 15 percent. The current focus is on Germany, where the fund’s exposure is about 23 percent, followed by France (approx. 19 percent), Spain and Finland (around 13 percent). The LEADING CITIES INVEST continues to include five office properties situated in the city center of Barcelona. Three properties are located in the L’Eixample district, a first-class office, shopping, residential and tourism quarter, right in the heart of Barcelona. The other two properties are located in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter that stretches from La Rambla to Via Laietana. All properties are let under a long-term lease to the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Balanced portfolio of the LEADING CITIES INVEST receives recommendation from Scope     
The LEADING CITIES INVEST was awarded an ‘aAIF’ rating by the well-known rating agency Scope in June for its balanced portfolio structure, bringing the fund into the highest grade of commercial real estate funds for retail investors. The real estate portfolio is among Scope’s top-rated portfolios. The LEADING CITIES INVEST is not invested in any hotels. Retail and gastronomy represent only around 6 percent of the fund assets. At 75 percent, the share of offices in the fund’s real estate mix proved successful during the Covid-19 crisis. The pandemic currently poses little threat to tenants, partly due to the high proportion of public-sector tenants, such as authorities, associations and educational institutions, of around 37 percent at present. Following the sale, the LEADING CITIES INVEST’s portfolio will include 41 properties at 27 locations in eleven countries. The investment fund aims to highly diversify risk based on a broad range of locations, types of use and duration of tenancy agreements.
For this sale, KanAm Grund Group has been advised by Pérez-Llorca and KPMG on the legal and tax/financial side respectively. Savills has assisted as intermediary in the transaction.