Spanish REIT, Entrecampos Cuatro, enters Spain’s student residences segment.

Entrecampos Cuatro SOCIMI, S.A. (YENT.MC), has invested €3.5M in the acquisition of a 1,728,69m² building in Madrid’s Universidad district. The listed property fund, which is led by seasoned businesswoman Lourdes Segura Rodríguez, plans to conduct a full refurbishment of the property located on nº 8 Calle Acuerdo and convert it into a student residence managed by a third party.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, “the purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector in Spain remains largely under-developed and immature, with the majority of student accommodation being managed by public bodies and religious orders.” As a result, Spain’s PBSA sector continues to attract institutional capital seeking to tackle the segment’s chronic undersupply which has a provision rate of c. 6% vs. 10% in Germany, 13% in France and 35% in the U.K. as well as satisfy growing demand from students for higher quality of accommodation and range of amenities.

Entrecampos Cuatro is the latest player to enter Spain’s booming student residences sector following a record 2017 which saw approximately €600M of transactions driven mainly by Azora’s sale of 34 assets to Resa (owned by AXA, CBRE GIP and Greystar) as well as the sale by Threesixty Developments of 6 properties to GSA (with financing by LaSalle).

Spain has a student population of over 1.55 million distributed across 82 universities, of which 13 are among the world’s top 500 and only c. 95,000 private purpose-built beds (6.1% provision rate) across c, 1,100 residences. Spain is also the first recipient country of Erasmus students and has over 100,000 international students, mainly from the EU and LatAm.

Entrecampos Cuatro, which was Spain’s first REIT to be listed on the Madrid Alternative Stock Exchange (MAB), currently trades at €1.83 per share and has a market capitalisation of €98.9M as at the 11^th of December 2018.