Madrid-based real estate investment trust Azora has received a sizeable investment, approximately 270 million Euros, from an unnamed sovereign wealth fund, which, with leverage taken into account, would raise the implied investment capacity of its third stated fund to 500 million Euros ($562 million).
Azora said the capital injection has allowed it to launch a new “European multi-strategy vehicle … with an investment horizon of between five to 10 years.”
The fund’s primary focus is on acquiring assets, including hotels, in Southern Europe.
A news release stated that the REIT now has “the flexibility to consider investments of all risk levels from development to those requiring lower levels of repositioning, as well as opportunities arising out of the uncertain current market environment.”
Azora’s first fund of 1.1 billion Euros, named Hispania SOCIMI, was instigated in 2014 and sold to Blackstone in 2018 at a net internal rate of return of 19%.
A second fund came out of its own balance sheet and investment from Azora management. That fund has been fully invested and “has already generated an average return of 23% on divestments to date,” the company stated.
Javier Rodríguez Heredia, managing partner of real estate at Azora, said allocation of the fund will consider “new trends in the way we live, work and play [which] will require a major transformation in how assets are used, designed and adapted to meet current and future environment standards.”
Founded in 2003, Azora has more than 6.5 billion Euros of assets under management.
At the end of 2021, Azora bought Italy’s Bluserena Hotels & Resorts brand, which has 13 hotels, for an undisclosed sum from the Maresca family.