A former real estate partner at New York\u2019s Perella Weinberg, Rigny says he set up the firm in March last year with backing from high net worth investors and institutions. The first two deals, done in rapid succession in summer, were acquisition of a holding that owns 7,600 French housing units valued at about \u20ac1bn, and then purchase of the asset manager for the portfolio. \u201cI spent 10 years at Deutsche Bank on the principal investor side and five years at Perella Weinberg investing its property fund, and simply got to the phase in my professional life where I had a strong desire to set up my own company,\u201d Rigny told PIE. \u201cOnce that decision was made I quickly saw a number of opportunities that we could go after.\u201d<\/p>\n
The housing portfolio was sold by LBO France and Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management\u2019s real estate arm (formerly RREEF), and bought by Rigny\u2019s group with equity provided by Paris-based Massena Partners and Farallon Capital Management. Rigny won debt funding of \u20ac620m in a five-year facility arranged by Natixis, of which 60% was placed with institutions by BNP Paribas Corporate Finance via a
\nsecuritisation vehicle.<\/p>\n
Six weeks later Rigny, based in London, announced that TwentyTwo RE bought a 40% stake in the housing portfolio\u2019s manager Financi\u0450re Scaprim, which with 147 staff in 18 offices across France manages \u20ac6bn of assets including office, industrial and retail plus 16,000 housing units. \u201cOur ambition is to build Financi\u00e8re Scaprim into a leading independent French real estate service provider to institutional clients,\u201d Rigny said. \u201cAs well as increasing our platform in France we are also looking to expand into other European countries such as Spain, where there is an opportunity .. to acquire assets at a significant discount
\nto historical values and where there is demand for operating platforms meeting international investors\u2019 standards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rigny told PIE the strategic ambition is to acquire and manage real estate in a business model based on providing an integrated service to clients combining property management, asset management and investment management services.<\/p>\n
Looking at investment targets, he sees real estate value in France mainly in segments overlooked by large institutions. \u201cThe French market is actually very active in some respects but quite different in others. The core market is active; French institutional investors are structurally net investors and are allocating a significant amount of capital to core types of properties. At the same time when international investors move onto the continent, the first market they think of is Paris because that\u2019s by far the biggest property market in the euro area. It\u2019s true that French and international institutions focus on the best properties, office and retail, so that market is quite expensive now because there is a lot of capital chasing it… But it if you look at secondary properties there are fewer buyers. There is still a quite large price gap between sellers expectations and buyers\u2019 expectations so those segments are much less active.\u201d<\/p>\n
TwentyTwo RE is already setting up operations to tap opportunistic real estate in Spain. \u201cNow we are looking to make hires in Spain and find the first investment opportunity. The first thing we want to do is set up an operating platform to manage assets and also loans, because of the transactions are likely to come in the form of loan acquisitions. And we need to set up investment vehicles. It\u2019s true there is a lot of opportunistic capital raised on a pan-European basis but there are few opportunistic markets right now when you look around Europe. UK is not an opportunistic market, France is not and Germany is not. Spain is really the market where you can find true opportunities for the profile of capital that is seeking theses kind of assets.\u201d<\/p>\n