From Ardian and Rockfield a 500 million fund for student halls of residence

The housing emergency, in the expression relating to the lack of student accommodation, attracts investors and operators. The emergency varies from country to country, with Italy being the European tail-end. We all remember the tents in front of the Milan Polytechnic of students protesting against high rents for housing in the city.

The problem concerns many universities, where the beds provided by the public are far from meeting needs and private campuses are still too few and often expensive.

The French group Ardian has therefore decided to position itself in the sector and launch a real estate fund to which Cbre Investment Management has contributed a capital raising of EUR 500 million on behalf of institutional investors. Ardian has thus signed a partnership with Rockfield, a vertical platform for student housing with offices in Madrid and Amsterdam and which has developed and managed 5,000 assets over the past ten years. The platform will have Italy at the centre of its pan-European strategy, given the housing shortage in our cities, alongside countries such as Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands and France. The team leading the project plans to complete the first acquisitions by the end of the year with a focus on sustainability. The assets that will enter the portfolio will, in fact, have to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, through improved environmental performance and through the use of renewable energy.

The aim is to create a diversified portfolio of quality PBSA (acronym for purpose built student accommodation) assets. At the centre of interest will be university towns in the countries mentioned. Consider that there are 300,000 new students every year in Italy who have to contend with a high housing shortage. In the crosshairs are income properties but also assets under construction.

The risk profile is core plus, i.e. portfolio acquisition of properties for income, in some cases after careful valuation. "Investing today in the European student housing market represents an unprecedented opportunity due to the lack of liquidity and insufficient supply in the main European university cities, combined with a growing demand, driven mainly by demographic factors," says Matteo Minardi, head of real estate in Italy and managing director of Ardian, who will lead the project at European level. We believe that Ardian's expertise together with that of Rockfield, as well as a strong cultural alignment, optimally position us to respond to this growing gap between supply and demand in the student accommodation market'.