Seize the moment and “close the circle”. With these two premises, the new project of the Abante manager was born, which is launched fully into the brick with a new line that integrates real estate advice for high net worth individuals with investment through a new fund focused on Spanish and European companies and through Vitruvio, the socimi that joined in 2022.
“It was what we needed to round off the circle,” Santiago Satrústegui, president of the firm, repeated during the presentation of the service this Wednesday in Madrid. It is a project that completes the firm’s advisory and management proposal and which aims to prevent the client from “stepping on the mines” and making the mistakes that individuals usually make in real estate investment.
Abante closed March with 11,300 clients and with assets managed and advised of more than 11,000 million euros, which is triple that of five years ago. The manager, however, did not want to share objectives regarding the new service. Neither has she established minimum thresholds to access it, although the project is focused on a “client of a certain size” and with “fairly high” assets, in the words of Satrústegui.
Within the line of personalized advice to clients, Abante offers the design of the strategy and a business plan to build a portfolio of real estate assets. Likewise, for clients with existing real estate assets, an optimization and repositioning strategy is designed.
The creation of a new investment fund, the Abante Sector Inmobiliario FI, will be another of the mainstays of the project. Its launch is scheduled for the coming weeks, once it receives the corresponding authorization from the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), and Spanish companies (60%) will have a majority weight in its composition compared to European ones (40%). %). The instrument will invest 65% in Socimis -half Spanish and half from the rest of Europe- and the remaining 35% will be property developers, hotels and real estate service firms. “The current environment is very favorable for this type of investment and this fund is a very efficient alternative for betting on real estate through a vehicle that will pay a quarterly dividend”, explained José Ramón Iturriaga, partner and manager of Abante who will be at the front of bottom. “In addition, the valuation gap between listed and unlisted real estate companies today is huge and not justified,” he adds.
Iturriaga believes that this type of investment, through listed companies, “is a very efficient way” for retail investors to reach “brick investment.” In addition, the manager’s partner believes that the companies in which the fund will invest “are usually the ones that take best advantage of new trends.”
In this sense, Abante’s estimate is that the returns via dividends offered by his new fund are “substantially better” than those that an individual can obtain by investing directly in real estate.
The other pillar to gain exposure in the real estate sector is Vitruvio, a Socimi established in June 2014 by the manager 360º CorA whose integration process in Abante concluded last year. Its investment focus is long-term and it has a diversified real estate portfolio located mainly in cities with high demand for living, working and buying. Listed on BME Growth since 2016, it has an occupancy level of 98.2%, a debt level of 25% (its maximum is 33%) and an average return of 4.9% at the end of March.
It is an investment option that is complementary to financial assets, which also allows family groups to contribute real estate to the company in cases of undivided ownership, as well as committing to the consolidation of a sector as fragmented in Spain as the Socimis. “The company has two objectives: the purchase of real estate taking advantage of the adverse environment and resume growth with capital increases, in addition to entering a growing market such as life rentals”, said Joaquín López-Chicheri Morales, partner of Abante and CEO of Vitruvio. The socimi has just announced the strategic plan that includes the proposal for a capital increase of 30 million euros that will be voted on at the shareholders’ meeting on May 23.
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