Blackstone’s last-mile business to hit €4bn

Blackstone is bolstering its rapidly expanding last-mile distribution platform through the purchase of a €450m (£393.1m) business. The private equity firm is acquiring Industrial Securities, the pan-European company which owns a portfolio of around 7m sq ft in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The purchase price reflects a yield of around 5.5%. If the deal completes it will mean that since Blackstone teamed up with partner M7 Real Estate to build its last-mile business at the start of last year it will have amassed almost €4bn of assets. Its largest deal so far has been the €1.3bn purchase of Hansteen’s European portfolio. In an interview with EG earlier this month Blackstone’s new head of Europe, James Seppala said: “When we looked through performance across our warehouse portfolio we saw there were tangential opportunities on smaller, more in-fill, urban assets that had been overlooked. “It’s a more difficult asset class to scale and underwrite across Europe efficiently as ownership can be quite disparate… It is possible that that will become a platform we ultimately manage, brand and potentially in time exit as one.” This would echo the strategy Blackstone undertook in building out its big box warehouse business Logicor, which it sold last year to China Investment Corporation for just over €12.2bn. Established in 1995 with offices in London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Luxembourg City, Industrial Securities is currently owned by Marcol Group and its founders, chief executive Stephen Lawrence and director Nigel Lax. In 2014, some €590m of the company’s debt was sold by Lloyds Banking Group to Marathon Asset Management for €280m in a loan portfolio called Project Aberdonia. CBRE is acting for Blackstone; Eastdil Secured is advising Industrial Securities.