Santander is negotiating the sale of its credit exposure on the Hesperia hotel group, a 136 million euros loan portfolio, with with several opportunistic funds, such as Apollo, Bain Capital and Bybrook.

According to the Spanish journal El Confidencial, the bank has already received offers for this loan portfolio, which includes eleven of the group’s hotels and offices as collateral.  Led by Santander itself, the transaction is not expected to be heavily discounted, as the loans are up to date with payments. 

The sale represents Santander’s exit from Hesperia’s credit pool. One of the largest hotel groups in the country, in 2014 the company controlled by the Galician Castro Sousa family had to sell assets to meet bank requirements to refinance debt, at a time when the bank was already Hesperia’s main financier. 

At the present, Hesperia is awaiting approval from the State Industrial Ownership Corporation (Sepi) for a 55 million euros aid package to deal with the effects left by Covid-19, which has the tourism and hotel sector as one of the main victims. Specifically, last March the group joined other hotel companies that applied for aid from the Solvency Support Fund for Strategic Companies managed by the Sepi with European resources.

Hesperia has a portfolio of 28 hotels in Spain with a total of 4,500 rooms, as well as four establishments in Venezuela. The group’s expansion plans for 2021 have so far focused on Latin America and the United States. In 2019, Hesperia posted revenue of 137 million euros, in line with the previous year, and made a profit of 15.5 million euros, up from 22 million euros in 2018. 

In recent months, transactions have been carried out on hotels operated by Hesperia on a leaseback basis. In July, the Grifols family, through the company Scranton, acquired the Hesperia Presidente hotel in Barcelona, located on Avenida Diagonal, for 125 million euros (including CAPEX). Likewise, in March 2020, the fund manager Meridia acquired the Hesperia Barcelona del Mar hotel, located on Calle Espronceda in the Catalan capital.

Original Story: Eje Prime | News
Photo: Facebook Santander
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield 

The real estate platform is seeking partnerships with developers by offering the structure of the US fund to landowners.

Blackstone is looking to sell the land it has in stock. For that, the US fund will ally with developers through the opening of its servicer Aliseda, which manages a 800 million euros portfolio of land, according to El Confidencial.

The aim is to open up the servicer to third parties through the transfer of the land, taking advantage of its infrastructure to ally with developers. 

The company claims that Blackstone’s infrastructure allows it to offer services at marginal cost. The fund assures that through this new formula it will be able to offer projects to the administrations to increase the supply of housing. 

Blackstone’s land bank in Spain came from Banco Popular, which after its merger with Santander sold it through Aliseda. The fund acquired them after increasing its stake in the servicer to 51%. 

Aliseda has a team of 80 people dedicated exclusively to urban development management in Spain. The first major project where the servicer wants to implement its new strategy is Sareb’s Neo Project, a tender launched by the entity to find a partner to help it manage a portfolio of land valued at 1.12 billion euros, on which it is planning to build 60,000 homes.

Original Story: Eje Prime |News
Photo: BlackStone Linked In
Edition & Translation:  Prime Yield