BCCIM Closes Fund With Merseyside Pension Fund and Secures First Asset
Joint Venture to Target Assets Across UK Regions
Barwood Capital Ltd (“Barwood”) and Caisson Investment Management (“Caisson”) have formed a joint venture (BCCIM) to target multi-let industrial and urban logistics assets across the UK regions.
BCCIM has secured a first close with Merseyside Pension Fund for its Urban Industrial Income Limited Partnership (UII), a seven-year vehicle investing in multi-let industrial and urban logistics assets, in regional locations across the UK, enabling it to purchase £30-40m of assets. Within a week it has already completed the purchase of its first asset, Rushock Trading Estate in Droitwich for £12.7m and is pursuing further opportunities. BCCIM is in detailed discussions with a number of investors for further closes in 2021 to increase the size of the vehicle.
In a sector characterised by structurally low supply, rising demand from both traditional light industrial tenants and higher value new entrants giving an increasingly sophisticated occupier base, the investment offers long-term rental and capital growth prospects.
The driver behind forming BCCIM is to offer clients a best-in-class fund manager and specialist asset manager, with a proven ability to acquire undermanaged assets with good growth potential across the regions in a sought-after sector.
Danielle Sheppard, Senior Investment Director at Barwood comments, “BCCIM is an exciting new joint venture between two well-known UK property companies with a similar ethos and culture. It brings together the investment management experience and knowledge of Barwood whilst incorporating the specialist asset management expertise of Caisson. We have already worked well together in our Barwood 2017 Fund and look forward to further success in UII.
Industrial property is in both Barwood’s and Caisson’s DNA and UII is a way to bring our expertise to investors looking to invest in the multi-let and urban logistics sub sector giving a strong income and capital return.”
James Ward, Asset Management Director at Caisson adds, “This sector has proved its resilience through the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic with strong rent collection and continued occupier and rental growth. Caisson’s specialist asset management approach of working closely with our occupiers and understanding the market and our proven sourcing and transaction capability combined with our proprietary market data has allowed us to invest UK wide and generate outperformance against the market benchmarks and underlying business plans.
This new JV will enable us to take advantage of the smaller end of the market where larger pools of capital have difficulty investing and managing in the absence of an expert in the sector”.
BCCIM was advised by Oliver Thompson at TDB Real Estate.
Rushock Trading Estate was acquired from Hovi, represented by Chris Bampton at BSB.