Carlyle raises €2.2bn European property fund

The Carlyle Group has closed its third European real estate fund, Carlyle Europe Real Estate Partners III, on €2.2 billion ($3.4 billion). 

The fund has already committed €715 million to 10 assets. Those investments include a 158,000 square meter residential building in Copenhagen, a 79,000 square meter high-rise office development in Paris’s La Defense, the renovation of a 42,000 square meter shopping complex in Aranjuez, Spain and the purchase of a portfolio of 11 office, residential and retail buildings in Stockholm comprising 114,000 square meters of space. The firm is targeting opportunities across all property sectors.

Carlyle’s two previous European real estate funds, the €427 million CEREP I and the €763 million CEREP II, have invested a total of €1.8 billion in 65 assets since 2001. In Europe the firm has focused its investment on single assets of more than €25 million.

It has teams based in Paris, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Luxembourg and Stockholm. With leverage, the pan-European team of 46 people will have maximum funds of approximately €9 billion to invest. 

With the closing of the fund, the Carlyle Group now manages $10.8 billion in ten real estate funds across the world, including €3.4 billion of assets under management in Europe. The total anticipated capitalisation of the global real estate portfolio is €20.3 billion, including committed equity and debt, of which €8.6 billion is in Europe.

The firm now manages a total of $81.1 billion in 60 funds across all its strategies. Carlyle topped the PEI 50, a ranking of the world’s largest private equity firms by funds raised in the last five years to April 2008.