Student Housing Portfolio Sold by CA Ventures

Real estate company CA Ventures has completed the sale of a purpose-built student accommodation portfolio, which consists of 897 beds.

The three assets that comprise the student beds are being acquired by funds managed by Apollo Global Management, in a deal worth £161m.

The portfolio consists of three assets located in Sheffield, Glasgow and Edinburgh, which all reached 100% occupancy in their first year of operation. The properties were all managed by CA ventures in-house PBSA operating platform, Novel Student.

Head of CA's European operations, Carlo Matta commented: "Only three years after establishing our European headquarters in London, our initial PBSA portfolio has driven our swift success across three leading UK cities for students, and its record-value sale represents a strong validation of our investment thesis centered around a prime offering."

"This milestone was made possible by the vertical integration of our expert team, who successfully managed the land acquisition, delivery, 100 per cent lease-up, operations and sale of this state-of-the-art portfolio despite the ongoing challenges presented by the global economic environment."

In the forthcoming academic year, CA plans to provide another 1,000 beds across Edinburgh, Leicester and Belfast. The real estate investment management company have also recently announced joint ventures which seek to expand the PBSA portfolio and Novel platform to Ireland, Spain and Italy.

The three sites had received financing from PGIM Real Estate to support their initial development.

Mathew Crowther, PRECap senior portfolio manager at PGIM Real Estate stated: "We are pleased to have supported CA in their inaugural PBSA development in the UK through our PGIM Real Estate Capital (PRECap) platform, the European flagship high yield debt fund series."

The sale was advised by Savills Capital Advisors. Sonia Wang, associate director for Savills also commented: "The significant level of interest in this portfolio demonstrates both the high quality of assets that our client created and continued investor interest in the resilient UK purpose-built student accommodation market."