Residential Land were recently featured in a keynote interview with Macquaire Capital in the PERE 2012 Global Investor 30 supplement.
The article written by Jonathan Brasse discusses Macquarie Capital’s advisory role in $36 billion of private real estate transactions over the past 9 years.
Macquarie has widened its client pool to include the world’s largest investors, but its executives stress that it has not turned its back on sponsors. “Whether we’re working for the capital providers or the sponsors of a transaction, we need to have equally acute sensitivity to the needs of both,” says Jonathan Harris, European head of real estate.
“We’re not just investment bankers. We bring corporate finance skills and creativity together with a strong under-standing of real estate right down to the asset level,” Harris asserts. “You traditionally haven’t found that in one place in the advisory world.”
In February, those skills came in handy when Macquarie advised London landlord Residential Land on a three-way partnership with private equity real estate firm Apollo Global and Ivanhoe Cambridge, the real estate subsidiary of Canadian invester Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, for a £250 million residential property investment programme. On that occasion Macquarie sat opposite the investor at the negotiating table.
“That was a good example of a sophisticated investor who was accustomed to the asset class and is a well-suited under-writer, but not in that market and not with this operator,” Harris says. “Residential Land is not a fiduciary and there were a few moving parts to the underlying real estate strategy, but that’s the sort of thing we get involved with.”
Macquarie says that the deal exemplified a growing desire among investors to engage in develop-to-core strategies.
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