The 43-storey tower was built in 2001 and designed by Jean Nouvel. The building comprises c. 27,000 sqm of office space in the Cologne ‘MediaPark’ within the core of the City. It was acquired by InfraRed in 2011 with 40% vacant space and following extensive refurbishment, occupancy was increased to over 90%. The building’s façade, lobby and lifts and other public areas have been extensively redesigned and reconfigured to meet modern standards, and meet the requirements of tenants such as The Boston Consulting Group, Liberty Mutual Group and Hays.
Simultaneously, InfraRed has also sold the adjacent 217 room four-star NH Hotel to Internos Hotel Real Estate Fund for €29.5 million.
Joram Szerkowski, responsible for real estate investments in Germany at InfraRed, commented:
“We acquired the Cologne Tower directly from a German bank when demand for similar assets with letting risk was relatively low. The high quality of the building, its core location combined with the extensive modernisation works we undertook allowed us to reduce vacancy, improve the unexpired lease length and thus reposition the tower as a core asset.”
Andreas Katsaros, responsible for real estate strategy and origination at InfraRed added:
“Creating core properties through intensive management (‘manage-to-core’) is the stated objective of many value-add investors and managers. The reality is that not many assets are in strong enough locations and have sufficient scale to be considered desirable, core assets by international institutions. We are very pleased to have achieved such a fundamental repositioning with a landmark building like the Cologne Tower in a top German city.”
InfraRed was advised by JLL and lawyers Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.
