Aeriance Investments, the European Commercial Real Estate Lending Specialist, has appointed Harin Thaker to the role of chief executive, as the business embarks on the launch of circa £840 million (€1 billion) of new debt fund activity.
Thaker has over 20 years’ of extensive industry experience and joins Aeriance’s growing team of real estate and debt specialists including Elliot Hyames and Louise Standring-Smith.
Elliot Hyames, previously Head of Sales at Dragonfly Property Finance, heads up Aeriance’s residential lending business and has 12 years of lending experience covering short term finance, commercial loans, development finance and second charge loans.
Standring-Smith has 25 years’ experience as both a lender and on the buy side, most recently working as a consultant to PointPark Properties and, prior to that as a director in the real estate group of Barclays Capital. Thaker was previously Head of international real estate finance at PBB Deutsche Pfandbriefbank AG, a specialised lender in real estate finance and public sector finance, and also served as a General Manager of Hypo Real Estate Bank International AG, before becoming a member of its management board in 2007 prior to its merger with Hypo Real Estate Bank AG in 2009.
Between 2005 and 2011, he held the role of Chief Executive EMEA at Hypo Real Estate International Bank.
Under Thaker’s stewardship the company is launching two new specialist funds, which it said will seek to emulate the success of previous formats.
The two new funds:
• Aeriance Mezzanine Real Estate Debt Fund 3 (‘AMREF 3’): This is a circa €500 million specialist, closed end fund focused on mezzanine financing opportunities of commercial properties throughout Europe. It will focus on: originating new and attractively priced junior financing backed by significant equity and viable exit plans; partnering with traditional lenders who are unable to fund parts of the capital structure due to policy constraints: and acquiring publicly traded debt, such as CMBS. AMREF 3 builds on the success of previous mezzanine debt funds managed by Aeriance which have distributed dividends of 6 per cent pa since their respective launches with overall net expected IRRs of 10 per cent.
• Opportunistic Real Estate Loan Fund 2 (‘OREL 2’): This is a closed end €500 million fund focused exclusively on senior and junior short term and development financing loans aimed at high end residential properties located in prime central London, such as Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. The Fund aims to capture a liquidity premium, created through a structural funding gap in this segment of the UK real estate market. OREL 1, launched in 2011, delivered distributions of 9 per cent pa after the initial investment period with an overall expected gross IRR of 14 per cent.
Aeriance now has four debt funds under management, covering both the commercial and residential sectors, investing over €1.4 billion in the European lending markets since inception in 2008.
Harin Thaker, CEO of Aeriance Investments, said: “Joining Aeriance represents a fantastic opportunity to work with a team of highly skilled real estate debt and fund practitioners and a business which has built an impressive performance track record since inception.
“We are launching two new debt funds at a time when banks are still facing challenges in their ability to provide new debt and underlying sentiment in the real estate markets has started to improve. The growing appetite for debt exposure both from borrowers and investors, will underpin what we regard as a compelling market in which to launch our fundraising activity.”
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