Grit Real Estate sitting on pipeline of investments across Africa

Grit Real Estate updated the market on its pipeline of potential investment opportunities with existing tenants and other multinational companies operating across the African continent on Friday.

The London-listed firm said it had concluded commercially binding, but conditional, agreements on a number of target acquisitions, most of which would be regarded as ‘category 2’ transactions in terms of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange listing requirements.

It said the target acquisitions would facilitate further diversification of the company's portfolio and exposure to high-quality multi-national tenants, underpinned by predominantly dollar and euro-denominated long-term leases.

Grit said the seven target acquisitions across four countries remained subject to various conditions precedent, and as such there was no guarantee that they would ultimately be concluded.

Funding strategies related to the pipeline, and other recently-announced investments, would be communicated in due course, the board said.

“The acquisitions are in line with Grit's strategy of acquiring superior quality assets tenanted by blue-chip multinational companies under long-term, hard currency leases, whilst further enhancing the quality and diversification of the portfolio in terms of tenant, geographic and sector exposures,” said chief executive officer Bronwyn Corbett.

“The transactions are accretive and will result in economies of scale by utilising Grit's existing extensive infrastructure across the countries we already operate in, while providing excellent opportunities to strengthen partnerships with key international tenants.”

Corbett said they also reflected Grit's evolved business strategy, which now included prefunding of selected risk-mitigated developments, and which was expected to deliver accelerated medium-term net asset value growth.

“The acquisitions are expected to provide investors with further diversified, secure and growing index-linked income and attractive capital growth potential from across Grit's high-quality portfolio, which continues to deliver attractive returns to our shareholders.”