Real estate Warehouse & logistics
Accolade signs record loan agreement worth EUR 137 million
10:46
Accolade Group, which focuses on investments in premium industrial real estate, has signed a loan agreement with a club of banks for EUR 137.5 million. It is the largest ever loan provided for a single industrial rental property in the CEE region. The money will be partly used to finance the construction of an automated distribution centre near the town of Kojetín.
"We thank our partner banks for their confidence in Accolade's activities in particular and the future of the industrial real estate market in general. We are extremely happy about that," says Milan Kratina, CEO of Accolade. Besides traditional factors, the huge increase in e-commerce has also spiked interest in Czech industrial real estate. In 2021, according to the Industrial Research Forum, the demand for rental space increased by more than sixty percent compared to 2020.
Accolade Group signed a loan agreement with the banks in the first quarter of this year. The financing parameters are set to take into account long-term cash flow so that the loan can be duly repaid in line with the repayment schedule. The bank club is led by Komerční banka, for which it is the first cooperation with Accolade. The other members are Česká spořitelna and Raiffeisenbank.
Accolade will use the loan to finance the construction and long-term tenure of an industrial facility in Kojetín, which is being built on the brownfield site of a former sugar factory. The facility will be leased by a global e-commerce leader, who will bring up to two thousand jobs to the region as a result.
“The Kojetín project is unique in many ways. We take the fact that the banks have provided us with the loan as a confirmation, among other things, of the exceptional environmental friendliness of the construction, since the financing banks subjected the project to a very strict assessment, in terms of both financial and environmental sustainability. A comprehensive heating system, the use of solar panels for electricity generation and environmentally friendly construction helped to meet the demanding requirements of the new EU rules," explains Accolade's CFO Tomáš Procházka, adding that besides the financing of the project itself, Accolade Group also negotiated a hedge against interest rate risk, which guarantees attractive fixed interest rates for the entire financing period.
The industrial facility near Kojetín, which is scheduled to be handed over to the tenant this summer, will meet the most demanding requirements for a 21st century distribution centre. The total area of the warehouse will exceed 187 thousand square metres. Thanks to the fact, however, that it is a multi-storey building, it will occupy only 51 thousand square metres of land. Robots and artificial intelligence will also be heavily involved in the operation of the facility. Accolade's intention is for the building to aspire to an exceptionally high score in the BREEAM environmental certification.
Natural features, such as beetle and lizard habitats and insect hotels, are also planned for the area, as well as beekeeping. Accolade will plant approximately 500 trees there, 300 of them directly on site and the rest in Kojetín. The entire distribution centre will be heated by heat pumps instead of gas. Photovoltaic panels with a capacity of approximately 4 MW will be installed on the roof of the warehouse. Most of the electricity will be consumed by the distribution centre; whatever is left will be fed back into the grid.
The emphasis on environmental friendliness has been part of the project since the very beginning. All of the construction work is provided by Goldbeck Bau, a company which operates a plant for the production of precast concrete parts approximately 12 kilometres from Kojetín. Thanks to the proximity of a railway, it was possible to transport 6,800 panels weighing over 80,000 tons by train to the site. The trains did the job of 2,267 trucks that otherwise would have been needed to transport the panels. Needless to say, the distance from which the building material is imported represents one of the many criteria that are taken into account in the environmental impact assessment of the building and its subsequent BREEAM certification.
