Blackstone to Sell Logicor for $14B

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Five years after establishing Logicor to serve as its pan-European logistics platform, Blackstone has entered into an agreement to sell the company to affiliates of China Investment Corp.  CIC will pay a whopping $14 billion for Logicor and its 147 million-square-foot portfolio of high-quality logistics and distribution warehouses.

Tamworth, Saffordshire Facility

Logicor’s collection of assets boasts locations in leading markets along the European supply chain in 17 countries. More than 70 percent of the properties are sited in the U.K., Germany, France and Southern Europe. In a prepared statement, Anthony Myers, Blackstone’s head of Real Estate Europe, said, “We built Logicor through over 50 acquisitions to be a premier pan-European logistics real estate company. It will now have an excellent new long-term owner, and we have no doubt that it will go from strength to strength in a sector with hugely positive prospects.”

Logicor holds court as one of the largest logistic real estate specialists in Europe, having quickly amassed its holdings through the purchase of portfolio after portfolio since its launch in 2012. Major transactions include the snapping up of a two-part portfolio encompassing 4.3 million square feet in Poland from Panattoni Europe in late 2012. In 2014, the company snagged SEB Asset Management’s 4.6 million-square-foot European portfolio. And in 2015, the company agreed to purchase Immofinanz’s entire 10.8 million-square-foot logistics portfolio, located in Germany and Eastern Europe. And the list goes on.

Today, Logicor’s portfolio is home to a bevy of big names, including the likes of Coca-Cola Enterprises, which occupies 233,000 square feet of warehouse space at Logic233@Dagenham in East London. Amazon is also on the Logicor tenant roster, occupying several properties, including two distribution warehouses totaling 562,000 square feet at GT257 in Leicestershire and Logic305 in Surrey, for which the company signed two 10-year leases in 2015. And XPO Logistics, one of the 10 largest global logistics companies in the world, committed to a 645,000-square-foot warehouse property in Tamworth, Staffordshire, in May, marking Logicor’s biggest lease agreement in the U.K. to date.

The Logicor deal is reflective of the current state of investment sales market in the European logistics sector. International capital was one of the main growth drivers in the market in the first quarter of 2017, with purchases involving international capital increasing 60 percent year-over-year, per a report by commercial real estate services firm JLL. Additionally, “large-size portfolio and platform deals remain highly sought after—total portfolio deals were up 9 percent year-over-year in value terms, whilst the volume of portfolio transactions exceeding €100 million nearly doubled over the same period.”

Blackstone expects to close the sale of Logicor later this year. It’s like déjà vu. In 2014, Blackstone sold IndCor, an industrial real estate platform it had begun assembling in 2010, to Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC for $8 billion.

Image courtesy of Logicor