An exterior view of Crystal Park office building (Mastern Investment Management)
Seoul-based property investment house Mastern Investment Management said Wednesday it plans to invite 110 billion won ($91.6 million) in South Korean retail money through its new real estate investment trust to take over part of equities in an office building in the suburb of Paris.
Mastern plans to list the REIT’s 22 million shares, each priced at 5,000 won, on Korea’s main bourse Kospi in August. The listing schedule will be determined after an initial public offering that is set to wrap up on July 24. Samsung Securities will underwrite the deal.
This will be part of a total of 320.9 million euros ($354.2 million) used to acquire equity in the Crystal Park office building and pay extra costs for deal procedures such as due diligence. Before the REIT investors, Samsung Securities, undisclosed Korean institutional investors and local asset manager La Francaise took part in the equity deal. The rest of the acquisition cost came from 432 million euros of loan from a German bank.
Located in a suburb on the western boundary of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Crystal Park office building is fully leased to four tenants: accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, scent maker International Flavors & Fragrances, cosmetic giant Estee Lauder and consulting firm Adelius. The nine-story building with two basement floors has a 44,944 square meters of floor space.
All tenants will lease the space in Crystal Park for at least seven years from June 2020, according to Mastern.
Cho Yong-min, executive director in charge of overseas investment at Mastern Investment Management, briefs reporters on REIT listing plan in Seoul Wednesday. (Mastern Investment Management)
The asset was first purchased by Samsung Securities last year. Cho Yong-min, executive director in charge of overseas investment at Mastern, said in a briefing Wednesday that drawing REIT investors’ money was part of its initial building acquisition plan in August 2019, which materialized after the Land Ministry here eased regulations on REITs starting this year.
The REIT seeks to expand its real estate portfolio so that the underlying assets could be worth over 1 trillion won by 2024, as Korean investors are poised to sell off the French asset by 2024. Cho said Mastern has expressed a bid to buy office building assets in cities such as Luxembourg, London and Tokyo.
The REIT is expected to strike some 6 percent of annual dividend yields for REIT investors each year.
Mastern was overseeing a total of 16.3 trillion won in assets as of June. Of the total, 3.8 trillion won of the assets are overseas properties.
By Son Ji-hyoung (
consnow@heraldcorp.com)