Blackstone pays €100M for Barcelona’s Tarragona Tower

UBS purchased Torre Tarragona in 2015 for €72 million from Alicia Koplowitz’s family office, Omega Capital, and has sold it to Blackstone for c. €100 million.

Opened in 1998, the Tarragona Tower is an emblematic office building located in the center of Barcelona, in its financial district and ​​surrounded by a wide variety of luxury services, ranging from restaurants, leisure to hotels. It has GLA of 18,138m² set across 19 stories and includes 256 parking spaces.

The building’s main tenant is Pepsico and other tenants include Acens (a cloud services subsidiary of Telefónica), NSK Ltd and the Gentec pharmaceutical group.

JLL has acted as advisor to the vendor and LaSalle has provided the financing for the acquisition. In fact, this deal fits into LaSalle’s Whole Loan Strategies programme, which had its first close in December 2018, and now stands at €600m+ of commitments. The programme’s strategy is to originate and hold whole loans with loan-to-values ranging from 70% to c.80% across various asset types, and targets volumes between €25 and €100 million.

Brad Greenway, senior executive of JLL has stated: «The Tarragona Tower attracted significant interest, underlying the continued attractiveness of the city as a leading global center for business.»

Amy Klein Aznar, Head of Debt Investments & Special Situations at LaSalle said: “We are pleased to be able to support Blackstone again, this time with our whole loan strategy on the Continent, where we continue to see opportunities and are able to offer sponsors a full range of debt solutions. The programme closed its first financing in December 2018, and currently totals five closed investments across Europe, equating to nearly 40 per cent of capital deployed.”

Ali Imraan, Managing Director of Debt Investments & Special Situations at LaSalle said: “This transaction was closed in under a month, demonstrating our ability to execute in tight timelines and tap into our extensive pan-European real estate platform. We are happy to support Blackstone in acquiring this high-quality office asset in one of Europe’s most dynamic cities, and also with the implementation of their refurbishment plans for the asset.”

Linklaters has acted for UBS.