Secure Income REIT is closing in on a £900m refinancing that is expected to result in the company paying a substantial dividend.
The firm, run by Nick Leslau’s and Mike Brown’s Prestbury Investments, will see the loan-to-value ratio of its £1.7bn portfolio slashed by 10 to 15 percentage points as a result of the refi.
In conjunction with its recently announced sale of Madame Tussauds, its LTV will now sit at an estimated 60-65%. Lloyds will also exit one of its largest pre-crash real estate positions as a result of the refinancing.
The refinancing is split across two deals – one for Secure Income REIT’s leisure assets, the other for its private hospitals.
Rothesay Life, the long-term liability investor owned by Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, GIC and MassMutual, is believed to be issuing a loan of £350m for the leisure properties on a 10-year term. Let to Merlin Entertainments, the world’s second-largest visitor attractions business, they are some of the best known in the UK and include Alton Towers, Thorpe Park and Warwick Castle.
Legal & General and AIG are in pole position to refinance the company’s 20 private hospitals, 19 of which are let to Ramsay Health Care, one of the largest global private healthcare providers.
The two insurers are refinancing the health assets with two separate loans of around £225m each held against two different pools of properties. The loans will both have terms of more than 10 years.
As a result of the deals the company’s cost of debt will to drop from around 6.5% to around 4.5%.
At the end of last year Secure Income REIT had £1.1bn of debt at an unusually high level for a listed property firm – an LTV of 75% – but one that was based on the 25-year leases secured across much of the portfolio.
The refinancing, combined with its ongoing £332.5m sale of Madame Tussauds (pictured) to Fubon Life, will bring it towards the LTVs of the major REITs, which are now typically around 30% to 40%. The high leverage combined with the strong investment market has made the company’s NAV per share one of the best-performing in the UK quoted market since it was listed.
Although the outstanding finance with Lloyds does not expire until summer 2017, Secure Income REIT has opted for an early refinancing as its costs, given the competitive price of debt today, will drop markedly, putting it in a position to pay out dividends.
Eastdil Secured and Morgan Stanley were appointed to explore the refinancing and weigh up the savings made by taking on fresh debt against pre-payment penalties and swap breakage costs payable to Lloyds in February.
Secure Income REIT was launched on the London Stock Exchange in June last year as a specialist vehicle to invest in long-leased, defensive and inflation-protected assets.
Its board includes property heavyweights Martin Moore, Ian Morris and Jonathan Laine as non-executive directors.
