Abrupt halt to one of the largest rental operations in Spain. The fund Cerberus is experiencing critical days in which it must decide whether to officially withdraw the sale process of Macc, or give a last chance to the finalist funds to improve their offers.
According to several sources familiar with the matter, in the offices of the US fund the formal process entrusted to Deutsche Bank last summer is practically considered suspended. The investment giant declined to comment.
The scales are expected to tip one way or another within days, after two agonizing weeks in which the message has begun to leak that Cerberus is going to reshuffle the deck and abort the process due to the poor offers received.
Macc is the rental housing socimi that the US fund created with the homes it acquired from Banco Sabadell and BBVA. As El Confidencial reported earlier last year, Cerberus began working on designing a potential divestment of its socimi, an analysis that eventually germinated into a formal mandate to the German entity.
In this portfolio, dubbed Project Gloria, it included 3,300 residential units, spread across the Community of Madrid (77%), Valencian Community (19%) and Andalusia (4%). The fund left out about 1,800 homes, mainly located in Catalonia, where there is rent control.
Although it was leaked that this operation could be valued up to 900 million, the reality has been very different, and the offers received value the entire portfolio at just over half that, around 550 million.
The three funds that have participated in this bidding are Pinbridge, King Street and Sixth Street. Two of them presented demolition offers, while a third made a partial offer, that is, only for a part of the portfolio, according to sources consulted by El Confidencial.
With these cards on the table, the reality is that the process is agonizing. The war in the Middle East, now three months old, further complicates a satisfactory outcome for Cerberus, as financing is becoming more expensive and players are becoming risk-averse again.
The alternative that the fund is proposing is what has been called privatization, which could well be defined as an orderly liquidation: selling one by one the 5,100 homes that Macc has. In fact, this was already the plan for the apartments it has in Catalonia that had been left out of the sale process.
Macc is the only large granular housing socimi with thousands of assets on its balance sheet. In the Spanish market there are other vehicles dedicated to this model, but of much smaller dimensions, such as Almond Core Centre, which has 200 assets in its portfolio valued at 74 million and is also for sale, or the joint vehicle of Clickalia and Vitruvio, with 150 apartments.
