LONDON, UK: Safestore Holdings has acquired the remaining 80% of the fairness owned by Carlyle Europe Realty (CER) within the Joint Venture formed in 2019.
The total consideration paid to Carlyle was €67m. The total preliminary money outflow is €139m and includes the share buy (€67m), refinancing of the existing borrowings (€67m), switch tax and different deal prices (€5m) and was funded from the Group’s existing mortgage facilities. The Joint Venture was acquired based on an enterprise worth of €146m.
The Joint Venture was setup in 2019 to buy and develop assets in The Netherlands and Belgium so as to leverage Safestore’s working platform outside our core markets. Since then, the Joint Venture has grown to a portfolio of 55,000 sq. meters (592,000 Sq Ft) of MLA which is currently 74% occupied.
The portfolio is made up of fifteen excessive high quality properties (twelve freehold properties, two floor leases and one leasehold property). Nine properties can be found within the Netherlands, six of that are concentrated within the Haarlem / Amsterdam space with additional properties in The Hague, Het Gooi and the recently opened Nijmegen store. In Belgium, two shops can be found within the Brussels area, two within the metropolis of Liege and additional properties in Nivelles and Charleroi. Safestore has managed the properties since acquisition by the Joint Venture
The Group’s funding is anticipated to be marginally accretive to Group earnings per share in FY2021/22 and can support the Group’s future dividend capacity. The anticipated preliminary yield based on total enterprise worth is 3.9%¹ which we expect to develop to Safestore’s regular returns hurdles because the portfolio matures. Post transaction, the Group’s LTV will increase to 31%. Financing capability under our RCF and Shelf facilities, mixed with our money reserves, is anticipated to be c. £219m following this transaction.
Safestore CEO Frederic Vecchioli commented: “Combining Safestore’s extremely scalable working platform and development expertise with Carlyle’s funding expertise proved to be a profitable partnership. We are now exploring additional alternatives to work together.”
Marc-Antoine Bouyer, Managing Director on the Carlyle Europe Realty advisory team, commented: “This transaction marks the culmination of a main acquisition and asset administration effort through our three way partnership with Safestore to assemble an institutional-quality self-storage portfolio of scale with publicity to prime cities within the Netherlands and Belgium. We believe that the market fundamentals for European self-storage stay extremely attractive and look ahead to working alongside Safestore in figuring out additional alternatives on the continent.”
Safestore is the UK’s largest self-storage group with 162 shops at 31 January 2022, comprising 129 wholly owned shops within the UK (including seventy two in London and the South East with the rest in key metropolitan areas such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and Bristol), 29 wholly owned shops within the Paris area and four shops in Barcelona.
www.safestore.com