The fund became the owner of a shopping center in St. Petersburg worth $1.1 billion

The largest investment deal on the Russian commercial real estate market has been closed. A record amount of $1.1 billion for the Galereya shopping center with an area of 192 thousand square meters. m on Ligovsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg was paid for by the American fund Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund.

The closing of the transaction for the sale of the Galereya shopping center located next to the Moscow railway station (192 thousand sq. m, opened in November 2010) for $1.1 billion was reported by Bloomberg, citing sources in the real estate market. The buyer was the investment fund Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund. Kommersant's interlocutor, close to one of the parties to the transaction, confirmed this information. Before this, the shopping center belonged to the Meridian Capital group, whose owners are former top managers of Kazkommertsbank Evgeniy Feld and Askar Alshinbaev. Meridian Capital, Morgan Stanley and Jones Lang LaSalle (adviser on the deal) declined to comment.

Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund (MSREF) manages properties around the world with a total value of more than $70 billion. The fund entered the Russian real estate market in 2009, promising to invest about $4 billion. So far, not a single transaction has been closed. At various times, MSREF was a shareholder of the development companies RGI International (owned 6.6% of shares, sold in 2011) and RosEuroDevelopment (10%, sold in 2010). Now owns 24.99% of the RBI company (builds housing in St. Petersburg, portfolio of projects - about 850 thousand sq. m).

The purchase of "Gallery" became the largest transaction on the Russian commercial real estate market (see table). Previously, investors preferred to invest comparable amounts in the acquisition of several assets rather than one object. Thus, at the end of 2010, O1Properties of Boris Mints bought five business centers from Horus Capital of Senator Sergei Gordeev for approximately $900 million. “Such a high cost of the Gallery is explained by the central location of the facility, at the intersection of Ligovsky and Nevsky Prospekts, and a high-quality pool of tenants. K Moreover, the facility is almost 100% commissioned,” says Svetlana Kara, director of the investment department at Praedium Oncor International. In addition, the facility is the largest shopping center in St. Petersburg (the closest competitor is Mega-Dybenko with an area of about 180 thousand sq. m). In Moscow, according to experts, there are retail facilities worth more than $1 billion, for example, the Metropolis (209 thousand sq. m.) and Evropeysky (180 thousand sq. m.) shopping centers, but they are not yet put up for sale.

In total, in 2011, in the Russian commercial real estate market, according to Praedium Oncor International, transactions worth $8.1 billion were closed. The largest in the retail real estate segment were the purchase of the Filion and Gorbushkin Dvor shopping centers by Yuri and Alexey Khotin for $500-600 million and the Gutseriev-Shishkhanov family of the Kaluzhsky shopping center for $250 million.

Anton Belykh

Morgan Stanley didn't skimp