Essex County sells Nordic RE fund stake

Essex County Council has sold a portion of its stake in Valad Europe’s V+ Nordic Fund, according to UK regulatory filings.

Valad is a European commercial real estate fund manager. The firm’s V+ Nordic Fund, also known as Nordic Aktiv Property Fund, raised €310.4 million in 2006, according to PEI’s Research and Analytics division.

V+ Nordic Fund is a mixed commercial property fund that invests in secondary office and industrial properties in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, according to Valad’s website. The fund is fully invested in properties including Denmark’s largest office building known as Copenhagen Business Park.

Other limited partners that transferred their stakes in the fund include Achmea Pan-European Pensions which sold its stake to Partners Group last year and BNY Mellon, which sold its stake to Buckinghamshire County Council in 2011, according to UK regulatory filings.

Valad Europe closed a subsequent fund – V+ Nordic Fund 2 – on €107.8 million in 2008, according to PEI data. The firm is based in London but has 22 global offices and more than €4.9 billion of assets under management, according to its website.

Essex County sold its stake to Cambridgeshire County Council. Both pensions were unavailable to comment by press time.

Partners Group also recently bought into the Nordic real estate market. The firm bought out the investors of Stockholm-based Niam’s Nordic Fund III, an opportunity fund which closed on €320 million in 2004. Deep into its divestment phase and with its return targets already met, Niam and its LPs agreed to sell the fund’s remaining assets at a discount to their net asset value of €300 million. The remaining asserts include three portfolios of retail and office properties in Sweden and Finland.