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Bloomberg
Gaw Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are part of a consortium buying a portfolio of shopping malls in Hong Kong from Link Real Estate Investment Trust for HK$20 billion to HK$25 billion ($2.6 billion to $3.2 billion), according to people familiar with the matter.
Gaw will be the largest investor in the deal, while Goldman Sachs will take a less than 20 percent stake in the assets, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the agreement hasn’t been announced. The portfolio comprises 17 malls, including in Kowloon and Hong Kong’s New Territories, the South China Morning Post reported earlier.
Officials from Link, Gaw and Goldman Sachs declined to comment. The sale was part of the company’s strategic review of its portfolio announced in July, as Asia’s largest REIT seeks to dispose non-core assets such as shopping malls. DTZ Cushman & Wakefield is acting as a real estate advisor, and HSBC Holdings Plc and UBS Group AG are financial advisors. Before the latest deal, Link had sold 28 malls worth HK$12 billion since 2014.
The sale came after Hong Kong set a world record for a commercial building transaction, with a consortium led by a state-owned Chinese energy company paying $5.2 billion to billionaire Li Ka-shing’s CK Asset Holdings Ltd. for an office building.
Link REIT has 155 properties across Hong Kong with about 10 million square feet of retail space and around 69,000 car park spaces, which accounted for 91.2 percent of the group’s total portfolio value, according to its interim report for the six months ended in September.
Link REIT only shortlisted private equity firms and institutional investors who are likely to hold properties for the long term, according to Antonio Wu, deputy managing director of capital markets and investment services for Asia at Colliers International Group Inc. “In some previous transactions some short term investors tried to put the properties back on the market and resold car-parks prompting negative response from the market. This time they want to do it properly,†he said.