Sirius yet to sate appetite for assets

€65m available for buys

SIRIUS Real Estate, which owns and operates a portfolio of branded business parks in Germany, plans to continue its acquisition programme and has the resources to acquire €65 million (R937.87m) in assets, on top of acquisitions already secured.

Neil Sachdev, the chairperson of Sirius, said yesterday that the company had continued to identify acquisitions, with €103.3m in new assets completed in the year to March and €49.9m notarised in the period or shortly after yearend. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has a secondary listing on the JSE’s main board.

Sachdev said Sirius owned 44 assets with 1.4 million square metres of net lettable area and a book value of €823.3m at the end of March, compared with €687.5m in the previous year.

The total portfolio occupancy rate improved from 80 percent to 81 percent.

He said they were confident the potential to continue growing the portfolio substantially further in this organic fashion remained strong.

Strategy

Sachdev added that one of the most pleasing achievements of the reporting period was being able to demonstrate the full cycle of the Sirius strategy, with €101.9m of disposals either completed or being agreed, in addition to the sale of a parcel of land for €1.5m.

He said a further mature asset was notarised for sale post year-end for €7m, while in January Sirius announced the sale of the Rupert Mayer Strasse business park asset in Munich for €85m to an institutional buyer, its most significant disposal to date.

“The core disposals demonstrate the effectiveness of the Sirius strategy, from acquisition, through the intensive asset management, to profit crystallisation upon disposal,” he said.

Sirius yesterday reported growth of 54 percent in adjusted profit before tax, from €22.9m to €35.3m.

Basic European Public Real Estate Association (EPRA) earnings a share increased 69 percent, from 1.88 cents to 3.18c.Like-for-like EPRA net asset value a share increased 8.5 percent and contributed to an increase of 9.7 percent in EPRA NAV per share, from 52.72c to 57.84c.

The board is recommending an increased final dividend of 1.53c a share.

Sachdev said Sirius remained well positioned to take advantage of operating in the most powerful economy in Europe and benefit from the strong occupier and investor demand across all sectors of the German real estate market. Sirius shares fell 2.47 percent on the JSE yesterday to close at R9.46.