This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
FUND manager ISPT’s sustainability-linked loans (SLL) now total $5.75 billion after the arrangement of one of the largest real estate credit deals in Australia in recent years.
The new $1.5 billion facility, one of the biggest for any Australian real estate fund manager, saw Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), ANZ, Westpac and HSBC acting as joint mandated lead arrangers and bookrunners and joint sustainability co-ordinators.
The facility is split evenly across five- and seven-year tenors with 20 lenders participating in the transaction. In addition, ISPT also secured an additional $400 million in bilateral SLL facilities and re-financed $1 billion, bringing ISPT Core Fund’s total debt package to $6.3 billion.
“Connecting our debt facilities through SLLs that are aligned with our ESG Strategy is another way that we hold ourselves accountable for delivering on our sustainability commitments,” said Steven Peters, chief sustainability officer, ISPT.
“We believe that this transaction reinforces ISPT’s approach to embedding responsible investment into every facet of our operations.”
The SLLs will be tied to ISPT’s existing sustainability performance targets, which encompass key metrics in emissions intensity, waste reduction, water consumption, and labour certification, aligned with the key pillars of ISPT’s ESG framework, including climate change, resource efficiency and supply chain.
This is ISPT’s third SLL, having restructured the ISPT Retail Australia Property Trust’s bank facilities as SLLs in September of 2021 and the completion of a $2.8 billion SLL for the ISPT Core Fund in April 2021.
Australia’s burgeoning commercial real estate green financing sector has grown further in the early running of 2024, with CBA launching a new loan for building owners looking to undertake sustainability-related upgrades to their assets, after rival NAB announced a new sustainability-linked loan offering to support investment in, and development and retrofitting of commercial buildings.
In October, Australia’s largest owner and operator of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA), Scape, converted a $1.4 billion loan into a sustainability-linked loan in a first for the country’s PBSA sector, and US investment giant Blackstone secured $1.45 billion for its first SLL in the Asia-Pacific and the largest of its kind to date in Australia’s industrial sector.
