Firm That Made £2B Pinewood Studio Fortune Raises £3B For New Opportunity Fund

A fund management business that made a huge and successful bet on the growth of film studio real estate has raised €3.8B (£3.3B) for a new fund targeting discounted opportunities as the market hits a period of uncertainty. 

Aermont Capital said this week that it completed the fundraising for its fifth fund in July. The €3.8B raised is higher than the fund’s target of €3B of equity, and is almost double the €2B it raised for its fourth fund in 2018. 

Aermont is run by Managing Partner Léon Bressler, the former chairman and chief executive of Unibail-Rodamco, once Europe’s biggest REIT. The firm’s other partners are former Norges Bank executive Paul Golding and Vincent Rouget, Nathan Shike and Alison Trewartha.

Aermont said the mandate for the new fund would be the same as for all of its others — look for large complex deals, particularly where it can own both real estate and the business that operates it. 

Its most high-profile deal in the UK is its acquisition of the famous Pinewood and Shepperton film studios to the west of London. It bought the studio for £323M in 2016, but after extending the facilities and leasing big chunks to online streaming giants like Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime, it was valued at £2.2B in November last year. 

In December it bought UK housebuilder Keepmoat for £700M, and it also owns a stake in European rented residential platform The Student Hotel. 

Not every one of its bets has paid off. In November 2019 it bought a 2% stake in Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield at about €140 a share, and the price has dropped by almost two-thirds to €50 a share since. In 2020 it pushed for the company to sell its U.S. business.