The manager AX Partners has reached 150 million euros in real estate assets under management with the purchase of a new property on Roger de Llúria street in Barcelona that it will remodel to boost its hotel use.
Aleix Recasens, founder and partner of the management company together with Salvador Aixelà, explained that the building represents his fifteenth investment: with an umbrella fund AX Partners Real Estate Fund, based in Luxembourg, it has already launched 15 specific vehicles that manage the contributions of “ “qualified investors”: professionals with minimum investments of 250,000 euros. “They are family groups or successful professionals, such as managers or footballers, who are looking for an investment with added value like the one we make, which invests in properties and repositions them to increase their value.”
This will be the case of the group's new acquisition, a building located at the confluence of Roger de Llúria and Consell de Cent streets, which today houses a hostel and which AX Partners will remodel, with a total investment of 9 million euros, and It will entrust its exploitation to the management company Sweet Inn, with which it has already partnered in other of the group's assets.
With a staff of 15 people, AX Partners has practically its entire real estate portfolio in Barcelona, in residential buildings, shared apartments and hotels. Among its most recent purchases are those of Diagonal 438, Turó Park Development, Cubics, Diagonal 318, and above all Sitges Cala Blanca, a 30,000m2 development in 28 luxury villas, in front of the British School of Sitges, in which it plans invest 60 million euros. The firm has also previously promoted luxury villas in Ibiza and Formentera.
“We are negotiating new acquisitions, in Sitges and Barcelona, to place our real estate portfolio above 200 million euros before the end of the year,” says Recasens.
The manager focuses on Barcelona “because of the great knowledge we have of the local market, since we are from here, and because right now we do not see any European capital with the capacity for growth that exists here. As investors, we are buying properties in the center at 4,500 euros/m2, an unimaginable impact in other large capitals.”
Furthermore, he acknowledges, in Barcelona there is now less competition from large institutional investors. “We also see an opportunity to position ourselves for a future in which it is foreseeable that the current restrictions on hotel and housing investment will disappear.”
