Mansford - A-One Business Center

The mandate was signed October 2008 and the crisis was in full swing. The seller’s goal, Mansford Holdings PLC, was to obtain a 5% net return sale for a NOI of approximately CHF 9‘000‘000.-. 

The first step was to define the acquirer’s typical profile in order to reduce our searching field to the bare minimum. We proposed the owner an “off market” operation to avoid the Medias’ attention. We needed a cash buyer and benefitting from some large financial surface, because the bank environment was too damaged for an investor to depend on it. Therefore, we decided to focus on 4 Swiss pension funds buying 100% with their own capital. The difficulty lied in the location because, although the complex was ideally located, at an exit of the Bern-Geneva highway and on the Geneva Lake side, the complex was far from the urban areas and the premium addresses to which the market had turned, in search of security. The site had solid arguments, such as the high-end construction quality and a 100% occupation rate with AAA tenants having signed long-term lease of 10 years.