£1.1B In Debt Deals Opens UK Lending Market — For The Right Asset Classes
Two UK commercial mortgage-backed securitisations totalling £1.1B have been launched in the space of a week, the first time UK commercial mortgage bonds have been issued this year.
Blackstone has secured £537M of debt against two industrial portfolios, including industrial outdoor storage assets, the first time IOS has featured in a UK CMBS.
And Vantage has secured £600M of CMBS debt against two Welsh data centres valued at £1.1B in the inaugural European data centre securitisation, Real Estate Capital reported.
Blackstone secured two loans from Barclays that have been packaged into £537M of bonds and sold to investors, according to a release from Moody’s Analytics, which rated the bonds.
The loans are secured against assets from Mileway, Blackstone’s last-mile logistics platform, and St. Modwen, which Blackstone took private in 2021. The loans are secured against 66 assets across the country, with the St. Modwen loan assets in the Greater Manchester area. IOS assets make up about 10% of the portfolio.
Data centres are one of the hottest asset classes in real estate right now, and Vantage is one of the biggest players, having secured $6.4B of growth equity earlier this year from listed investor DigitalBridge, formerly Colony Capital, and private equity firm Silver Lake.
The £600M CMBS is secured against two Welsh data centres called CWL 11 and CWL 13, CoStar reported. They account for 111,828 kilowatts of power to data centre providers. Data centres are different from many real estate asset classes in that tenants pay for power access rather than renting area by the square foot.
The securitisation is significant in that it shows debt investors who would normally buy bonds backed by standard real estate loans are willing to buy bonds backed by data centre loans with this different way of measuring income.
