Ventas Nails Down $2.8B Unsecured Credit Facility

uCity Square in Philadelphia. Image courtesy of Ventas

Ventas Inc. has closed a new four-year, $2.75 billion unsecured credit facility. With support from a total of 24 new and incumbent financial institutions, the credit facility reportedly was substantially oversubscribed.

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The transaction reinforces the company’s ample liquidity, while extending its debt maturities and improving its borrowing costs, according to a prepared statement by Robert Probst, Ventas executive vice president & CFO.

The facility is initially priced at 82.5 basis points over LIBOR, based on Ventas’s debt ratings, a five-basis point improvement versus its previous unsecured revolving credit facility, which was set to mature in April 2021. The new facility’s maturity date is January 2025, which can be extended for an additional year at Ventas’s option, subject to certain conditions.

At closing, the new facility was substantially undrawn, providing Ventas with nearly $2.7 billion of available borrowing capacity.

The facility includes a $1 billion accordion feature that permits Ventas to expand its borrowing capacity to a total of $3.75 billion.

In line with Ventas’s commitment to ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues, the credit facility includes a reduction in borrowing costs based on achieving specific sustainability-linked metrics.

BofA Securities Inc. and JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. were the joint bookrunners for the credit facility. Bank of America N.A. is serving as the administrative agent, and JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. acted as the syndication agent.

Deal-making, coast to coast

As befits a player of its size, Ventas has been steadily making some sizable deals.

About a year ago, it formed Ventas Life Science and Healthcare Real Estate Fund LP, a perpetual-life fund targeting core and core-plus life sciences, medical office and senior housing assets.

In October, a Ventas affiliate acquired Genesis South San Francisco, a two-building, nearly 800,000-square-foot campus, in a transaction worth about $1 billion.

The following month, Ventas teamed up with Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC in a joint venture intended to acquire four life sciences buildings under development in Philadelphia—including One uCity Square, a University of Pennsylvania–affiliated expansion of the uCity Square project—as well as in Pittsburgh and Arizona.

A CBRE report late last year documented a booming demand for life sciences real estate, which drove both a 12 percent increase in nationwide inventory in 2020 and a surge of conversions of other property into lab space.