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Amro plots €300m student housing jv in Iberian expansion

Student housing specialist Amro Real Estate Partners is seeking a joint venture partner for a €300m (£262m) capital investment in Spain and Portugal, as part of plans to ramp up its presence in both countries.

Amro has appointed CBRE’s Spanish arm to seek a jv partner for a 5,000-bed investment platform, covering development, refurbishment, forward purchase and acquisition.

The strategy forms part of Amro’s broader plans to expand its reach in Iberia, in an effort to take advantage of a growing appetite for purpose-built student housing in these markets.

To support this, Amro will launch its first European office in Madrid to manage its strategy in the region, which will initially be staffed by three people.

It has also invested in a 360-bed student housing development site in Granada, with construction beginning in July. It is expected to complete in November and slated to open its doors in January 2020.

Managing director Raj Kotecha told EG that there is a “strong” pipeline of further transactions, covering key cities including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Lisbon.

Around 3,000 beds are currently under negotiation, 1,300 of which are under exclusivity across both Spain and Portugal.

Kotecha said that the region has more than 1.8m students but only 97,000 beds. Additionally, he pointed to limited competition in the sector, seeing as much of the available product is run by religious orders or public universities.

He said: “Student housing is a category has evolved tremendously over the past 10 to 12 years. Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal, is in the early stages of starting that process.

“Demand for purpose-built accommodation is significantly outstripping supply, and competition from professionally-managed schemes is limited.

“We feel the market is going to move quickly, so we are entering the Iberian market quite aggressively to achieve scale quickly. We have already seen a very strong level of interest from investors.”

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