ECE buys Asturias shopping centre from intu Properties JV for €291M

British REIT, intu Properties PLC, has announced today that its joint venture with Canada Pension Plan Investment board has agreed to sell the intu Asturias shopping centre in Oviedo, Spain for €290.0 million.

The buyer is ECE European Prime Shopping Centre Fund II which, as a result, is now fully invested. It is the first property in Spain for Hamburg based ECE, the company which was founded in 1965 by mail-order pioneer Prof. Werner Otto (1909-2011) and is owned by the Otto family.

Cushman & Wakefield has advised ECE on the acquisition and will continue to act as property manager as well as center & leasing manager for the new owner. The vendor was advised by UBS and CBRE.

Opened in 2001, “intu Asturias” offers around 140 shops across a leasable area of approx. 74,000 m² as well as approx. 5,000 parking spaces. The center is located in the Asturias region, an economically strong region in the northern part of Spain. It has a very good market positioning and provides potential for further value-add developments. Anchor tenants include Primark, Media Markt, H&M, an Eroski hypermarket, and the Inditex brands Zara and Bershka. Plans for further development include a restructuring and modernization of parts of the center and the addition of further attractive anchor tenants.

“We are delighted to enter into an attractive market which we have had in our investment focus for some years now,” said Dr. Volker Kraft, Managing Director of the ECE Real Estate Partners fund management company. “With the acquisition of intu Asturias, we have complemented our ECE Fund II portfolio by adding one of the strongest shopping centers in Spain with more than nine million visitors per year. Although it is currently virtually fully let, we have identified a number of exciting value-add opportunities, which we want to realize in accordance with our investment strategy.”