Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies has provided a circa £140 million loan to M7 Real Estate to refinance its Box+II portfolio of retail warehouses in the UK, CoStar News can reveal.
The loan, which refinances a £137.8 million loan from Apollo, reflects 50%-60% loan to value and carries a margin of circa 400 basis points. It matures in three years, but can be extended twice by another year.
In January 2021, M7 said it had assembled a £300 million portfolio of 19 retail warehouses following the full deployment of capital raised across its M7 Box+I and M7 Box+II funds. The pan-European investor and asset manager had raised £130 million of equity from global high-net-worth, family office and institutional investors. Aberdeen Standard Investments provided a £26.15 million loan for the M7 Box+I fund.
The M7 Box+II fund has nine assets, mostly in the South East, totaling 1 million square feet. Compared with other retail assets, retail parks fared relatively well during the pandemic as consumers used their cars to buy and collect goods from the stores.
M7 had launched the fund in the second half of 2020, six months after the start of the pandemic, to focus on selected retail warehouses with potential for future rental and capital growth, through asset management and an anticipated re-pricing as they became more important in the last-mile delivery chain.