Sirius Real Estate to buy Hartlebury Trading Estate for R2.4bn, its ninth acquisition this year

Sirius Real Estate, JSE-listed owner of industrial parks in Germany and the UK, has announced a third acquisition in a week - it will buy Hartlebury Trading Estate in the UK for £101.1 million (R2.41 billion).

“The acquisition is transformational for Sirius' UK business, which operates as BizSpace, where it will increase the size of the portfolio by 18% to 8.3 million square feet, while growing the gross UK asset value by about 20% and immediately boosting revenues by 10%,” said Sirius’s CEO Andrew Coombs.

This transaction follows the announcement last week of acquisitions in Dresden and Bedford and it is the ninth business park the group has bought in 2025, with a total investment value of €289.9m that has added €20m of net operating income.

The Hartlebury estate currently generates net operating income of £6.9m from over 100 tenants. It has been acquired with 84% occupancy, with the majority of vacant space either recently refurbished or newly built.

The transaction reflects a net initial yield of 6.45% after acquisition costs, while also offering reversion potential through letting off vacancy and asset management initiatives.

Hartlebury Trading Estate is set on a 171-acre site comprising a multi-let industrial park with about 1.5 million square feet of mainly warehouse accommodation, alongside 17 acres of industrial open storage plots.

Coombs said Sirius had already identified a number of opportunities to increase income, in line with its value-add asset management strategy, including environmentally focused upgrades in the near term.

With low building coverage of 19% and configured in a way that allows it to be separated into three separate estates, Hartlebury Trading Estate offers asset management opportunities, including benefitting from two development plots that provide optionality and longer-term potential to extend.

The business park was originally built by the Ministry of Defence as an RAF maintenance base. It was therefore also well suited to defence-related businesses.

Hartlebury is 10 miles from the M5 motorway, while a train station adjacent to the northern entrance is an attractive for occupiers whose staff can commute from surrounding locations.

The region is serviced by Birmingham Airport, the UK's seventh largest airport, and East Midlands Airport, which is the UK's largest airport for pure freight.

"This transaction materially scales our UK portfolio and positions us as a leading player in the Midlands region,” said Coombs.

"We have now fully allocated the capital from our two equity raises in November 2023 and July 2024, as well as the corresponding leverage that was unlocked from the May 2024 bond tap and January 2025 bond issuance,” said Coombs.

He said that while there was still some balance sheet headroom remaining as a result of the valuation increase in the last financial year, they were pleased that their capital deployment had been successful and shareholders would see the effects come through in the group second half results and beyond.

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