Arvi Luoma had hoped to take his team at Blackbrook Capital for a celebratory dinner last week to mark the company’s first year in business, but lockdown scuppered that plan. Instead, he blew the budget on a giant cake modelled on an industrial warehouse. As Luoma puts it, “one needs to adapt to the situation”.
The Blackbrook chief executive has had to adapt many of his plans during the past year as he gets underway on a journey that he hopes will result in an investment firm with €1bn (about £857m) in assets under management within the next two years.
Arvi Luoma had hoped to take his team at Blackbrook Capital for a celebratory dinner last week to mark the company’s first year in business, but lockdown scuppered that plan. Instead, he blew the budget on a giant cake modelled on an industrial warehouse. As Luoma puts it, “one needs to adapt to the situation”.
The Blackbrook chief executive has had to adapt many of his plans during the past year as he gets underway on a journey that he hopes will result in an investment firm with €1bn (about £857m) in assets under management within the next two years.
The former head of European investment at sale-and-leaseback specialist WP Carey, Luoma set up Blackbrook with Gordon DuGan, the ex-boss of WP Carey and more recently chief executive of Gramercy Property Trust. With €1bn in capital and the backing of Eldridge Industries, the plan was to make a big launch at the annual MIPIM conference. The event’s cancellation as a result of Covid-19 put paid to that.
Eldridge took a “reasonable, practical” approach to continuing the launch, Luoma says, as he and DuGan worked out how best to start discussions with regional dealmakers. “It perhaps helped that a lot of people started to be at home in their living rooms,” Luoma says. “Instead of going to MIPIM, arranging 20 phone calls a day was relatively straightforward.”
The company was under no pressure to make acquisitions until the effect of the pandemic on its markets became clear, although Luoma admits that a desire to sit back and monitor the market had to be balanced with “my own drive to get this thing off the ground and start building a portfolio”.
The first deal came in September – a last-mile logistics site in Denmark leased to freight carrier Danske Fragtmænd. “Getting a deal done forces the business to get into shape – test the plumbing, test everything’s working, get the deal under the belt,” Luoma says.
Blackbrook has since built a portfolio of properties valued at €200m, making four further acquisitions in four other countries: a Sainsbury’s logistics site in Scotland; a site in Poland understood to be let to Amazon; a supermarket portfolio in Portugal; and a portfolio of grocery stores in Spain.
More deals are looming – Luoma hopes to announce Blackbrook’s next investment this month and expects assets under management to rise to €350m in the coming months.
“From my perspective as someone setting up a business, I feel that the first year has been extremely important in getting us off the ground and building up a good, solid portfolio – this is the springboard for our growth phase,” he says. “To be able to build up €200m throughout the depths of the pandemic has been great but our real goal is to be doing €500m-plus a year. I’d expect us to be getting up to that €1bn in AUM over the next 24 months.”
Headcount is growing too. In September the company hired Jon Strang from Clarion Partners Europe as a director in its investment team. Since then, Northwood Investors’ Alice Vacani and Eldridge’s Sameera Kolhatkar have joined as senior associates.
Those new team members have all been given a chance to try the anniversary cake, Luoma says, although he fears that a few days on, it might be “past its prime”. That celebratory dinner will be worth it when it arrives.
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