UK’s Henderson Park named as third Green Reit bidder

UK-based real estate investment firm Henderson Park has emerged as the third remaining bidder for Green Reit, the Dublin-listed property company with an annual rent roll of €73 million, as final offers are set to be submitted next week.

Henderson Park, set up by former Goldman Sachs and Mount Kellett partner Nicholas Weber in 2016, has made it through to the second round of bidding, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

The Irish Times reported earlier in the week that Irish Life had dropped out of the race for Green Reit, leaving California property giant Kennedy Wilson, a German company, understood to be the commercial property unit of DekaBank, and a UK-based firm with US connections in the process.

IPO

Spokesmen for Green Reit, Kennedy Wilson, Henderson Park and DekaBank declined to comment on the matter to Bloomberg.

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Green Reit, co-founded by Stephen Vernon and Pat Gunne, became the first Irish real-estate investment trust to float on the Irish stock market when it raised €300 million in an initial public offering (IPO) in July 2013. Legislation paving the way for such trusts in the Republic had been enacted only months earlier.

The group went on to amass a €1.48 billion portfolio of prime office, logistics and development assets, with the help of additional funds raised through the issuance of additional equity and debt.

The portfolio includes Horizon Logistics Park, close to Dublin Airport and the M50 motorway; One Molesworth Street, which is partly let to British bank Barclays and Canadian investment bank TD Securities; and the Central Park office complex in Sandyford, in south Dublin.

However, Green Reit’s board put the company put it up for sale three months ago after concluding, on carrying out a strategic review, that its share prices had been “subject to a material and persistent structural discount to its net asset value per share over three years”.

Final bids for Green Reit are due on July 25th, six weeks after initial proposals were submitted.

Shares in the company have surged by almost 20 per cent since then to about €1.83 to bring them into line with the value that Green Reit put on its assets on a net basis at the end of December. The company has a market value of €1.28 billion.

Crash

Henderson Park Capital teamed up with developer Joe O'Reilly's Chartered Land in May to buy the landmark Heuston South Quarter in Dublin from US property group Marathon Asset Management for €222 million.

Kennedy Wilson was one of the first overseas property firms to enter the Irish market following the crash. Its Dublin holdings include the five-star Shelbourne Hotel, Portmarnock Hotel and Golf Links, Stillorgan Shopping Centre, Clancy Quay apartments complex in Dublin 8 and landmark Capital Dock mixed-use project in the south docklands.

Units of Dekabank has also been active in the Republic in recent years, buying the Gibson Hotel in Dublin's north docklands for €87 million in 2017. In 2016, it bought the former Burlington Hotel in the capital for about €180 million and spent a similar amount on the Whitewater Centre, a shopping mall in Newbridge, Co Kildare.