This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
SCAPE Australia has entered a $1 billion joint venture partnership to develop purpose-built student accommodation across the country’s growing student housing sector.
The joint venture between Scape, Dutch pension investor APG Asset Management N.V. (APG) and global real estate investor Ivanhoé Cambridge is seeded with a prime development opportunity of circa 1,000 PBSA apartments at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.
The Queen Victoria Market apartment development is in partnership with Lendlease and the City of Melbourne.
“We are excited to have high calibre global investors APG and Ivanhoe Cambridge partner with us again in the PBSA sector, for our third develop-to-core JV, following the successful journey we have been on for purpose-built student housing over the past 10 years,” said Stephen Gaitanos, co-founder at Scape.
The joint venture will continue Scape’s focus on urban location within close proximity to leading universities.
The venture will utilise Scape’s significant operational scale of 17,200 operational apartments and an internal team that already manages Australia’s largest privately owned residential-for-rent portfolio.
“This comes at a very exciting time with our current portfolio at full occupancy and a clear need for more well designed and located rental accommodation in Australia. We look forward to continuing to grow this new venture and development pipeline on our pathway as Australia’s largest end-to-end specialist residential rental and operating accommodation platform,” added Gaitanos.
“Through our vertically integrated platform we manage every aspect of the asset creation process and ongoing operations – a platform designed to ensure the communities we create and manage provide exceptional outcomes for both our (student) residents and investors.”
The venture will be supported by the strong recovery in Australia’s international and domestic student numbers and the shortage of student accommodation, which has led to low vacancies and strong rental growth.
“The PBSA sector is often considered the entry level for young renters in the residential sector and as a consequence helps address important issue such as housing affordability and availability,” said Graeme Torre, head of Asia Pacific real estate at APG.
“Professionally managed student accommodation buildings with improved energy efficiency and carbon footprint support our goals around responsible impact investing. We have had a very successful partnership with the Scape team who have proven themselves to be capable of developing and managing first class student accommodation assets.”
In February, APJ’s Nelson Yap spoke to Simon Hulett, head of direct investment at MaxCap Group and Ryan Banting, executive general manager of social infrastructure at Australian Unity, about the growing strength of the PBSA sector.
Just last month in the sector, Brookfield Asset Management purchased 100-106 Franklin Street near Queen Victoria Market from Landream, with plans to amend the previous BTR approval and instead develop a 39-level tower with 1,013 rooms for student accommodation.
The Scape Australia joint venture is subject to regulatory approval.