In terms of its hotels, the company currently owns 37 establishments, and will continue buying new units until the end of the year. “We are looking at block operations as well as certain individual deals”, explained the Director at Hispania and Head of Corporate Development of Azora, Cristina García-Peri, to Efe, quoted by Spanish Real Estate.
Hispania was created in 2014 with the aim to capture funds to purchase assets, for three years, and improve them. Over the next three years it would focus on managing them and would sell them all before March 2020, in order to the shareholders to capitalize their investment. According to Spanish Real Estate, the idea is to keep Socimi beyond 2020, but with new shareholders.
This plan will continue for some of its current portfolio, for its rental homes (worth around €230 million) and offices (around €520 million), whereas for its hotel assets (more than €1,200 million), “it now makes the most sense for us to change shareholders”, explained Cristina García-Peri.
“The idea of selling the assets, making cash and distributing it with a large dividend made sense where we were dealing with diverse assets, but nowadays 70% of Hispania’s portfolio is worth more together than separate”, she said. For this reason, it is going to divest its residential rental assets, homes that it is selling off one by one, and the 25 office buildings that it holds in Madrid and Barcelona.