Charter Hall has continued the growth in its industrial platform by acquiring circa $700 million in industrial assets since 1 July 2015. The industrial and logistics sector has been a key focus for the Group over the past three years given the sectors strong property fundamentals with the Group’s total industrial and logistics funds under management increasing from $800 million as at 1 July 2012 to $3.5 billion today.
The $700 million in acquisitions over the past three months have been acquired by Charter Hall’s unlisted managed funds, the Core Plus Industrial Fund (CPIF), Core Logistics Partnership (CLP) and Direct Industrial Fund No.3 (DIF3).
David Harrison, Joint Managing Director, said: “We continue to improve the quality of these portfolios through a disciplined approach to asset selection, a preference for off market transactions and an emphasis on quality tenants, long leases and prime estates and single tenant assets.
“We will continue to refine these fund portfolios through the pre-leasing of land banks, recycling of non core assets and future acquisitions,” Mr Harrison added.
CPIF Fund Manager Paul Ford said: “Our focus is on owning and managing a geographically diverse and high quality portfolio of industrial and logistics properties leased to high calibre tenants on long term leases.
“Evidencing our strategy to reduce the building age of our portfolios, we have delivered 24 new preleased logistics assets across the Group industrial platform valued at over $770 million and covering approximately 490,000 square metres. The development pipeline will be pre-leased to deliver further high quality investments to deliver upon fund objectives,” Mr Ford added.
Commenting on the growth of the CLP portfolio in less than three years since inception, Fund Manager Simon Greig said: “We’ve grown the CLP portfolio from one asset in January 2013 to a $1.2 billion national portfolio with a sector leading WALE of 10.3 years. The portfolio has a tenant register of high quality international and national logistics companies and a resilient logistics theme consistent with the mandate created by Charter Hall and endorsed by our institutional CLP partners.”
Settlement of the acquisitions has or will occur prior to 30 September 2015.