Operators have obtained €95 million in financing, or about $102 million, for a new Six Senses resort hotel planned near Athens, Greece.

Hospitality giant IHG Hotels & Resorts is developing a project with 60 hotel suites and 12 branded residences in Porto Heli, expected to open in 2026 in the Argolis region on the Greek mainland. It will be the first Greece location for the upscale global Six Senses brand, after bond financing was obtained through arrangements between London-based merchant bank CBE Capital and Greek financial institution Piraeus Bank.

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Global property investor Hines is looking to significantly boost its United Kingdom industrial property holdings with two portfolio acquisitions expected to total more than £110 million.

Sources said the Houston-based company is in talks to buy Project Iona, a portfolio of six industrial properties being sold by Legal & General Investment Management, for about £80 million. Separately, Hines completed the acquisition of Project Clover, consisting of three light-industrial multi-tenant properties, from investor Columbia Threadneedle for about £34 million.

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The Central Group, an investment firm based in Thailand, is acquiring a Berlin building housing the luxury department store KaDeWe from investor Signa Prime, after Signa’s recent insolvency filing. The sale price is expected to be more than €1 billion.

This would be almost €400 million less than the valuation of the property a year ago, when the Central Group agreed to purchase half of the shares in the building but did not complete the transaction. Central Group also holds half of the operating company KaDeWe Group and is aiming for a complete takeover of the company, according to market sources. KaDeWe also operates the Alsterhaus department store in Hamburg and the Oberpollinger store in Munich.

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Logistics property sales transactions are multiplying in France, after the volume of first-quarter investments topped the year-earlier figure by 43%, according to data firm GIE ImmoStat.

Brokerage Cushman & Wakefield projects rising demand will bring the country’s logistics deals to more than €2 billion for full-year 2024, and they could even approach €3 billion. “We are in a transitional period where liquidity is returning on larger volumes, with portfolios of €200 million, €300 million or more which can be transacted, whereas the liquidity threshold was lowered between 2022 and 2023,” said Romain Nicolle, who heads Cushman’s office in Lyon, France.

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Developers are planning a beachfront recreation and tourism area, along with numerous homes and offices, for an industrial site near downtown Montreal that was once used by ships traversing the Lachine Canal before shipping traffic was diverted to the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1970. 

Canada Lands plans to start selling lots next year for a project that includes 2,800 housing units on the Wellington Basin, spanning a total of 3.2 million square feet of construction on a 1.5 million-square-foot site. The project would require land decontamination and other approvals from the city of Montreal.

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The struggling office market is weighing on the finances of banks, with two of the largest lenders in the United States saying loan nonpayments from those properties are piling up.

Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank measured by assets, said it quadrupled the amount of bad loans it charged off during the first quarter to $350 million compared to the previous quarter, driven by commercial loans for office properties. Problem office loans are also an issue at PNC Financial Services Group, as its nonperforming segment rose 26% to $923 million in the first quarter compared to the prior quarter. Banks classify loans as nonperforming when borrowers are at least 90 days late on payments but still hold them on their books.

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This report was compiled from CoStar’s news publications in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany.