“Baltisse and Straco Real Estate acquire a majority stake in Speedwell”
“The real estate developer, founded by two Belgians, is active in Romania and is also looking toward Poland”
Baltisse, the investment fund of Filip Balcaen, and Straco, the vehicle of the lab entrepreneur couple Gino De Raedt and Frederica Verheyden, are making a joint investment in Eastern European real estate. The two funds have together acquired a majority stake in the Romanian real estate developer Speedwell. The parties announced this in a press release on Monday.
Speedwell was founded in 2015 by Flemish engineer Didier Balcaen (no relation to Filip) and architect Jan Demeyere. Over the past decade, Speedwell has raised €200 million in capital from a group of entrepreneurial families from West and East Flanders for the development of real estate, mainly in and around the Romanian capital Bucharest. Baltisse and Straco have been among them from the start.
Both funds were also directly involved as co-investors in several Speedwell projects. Baltisse is also the main investor in WellOne, the fund that Speedwell set up in 2019 for its residential projects in Romania. “We’ve been courting for years — now we’re getting married,” says Didier Balcaen.
CO-FOUNDER SPEEDWELL
Besides a “cash-out moment,” Balcaen and Demeyere mainly wanted to simplify the structure of their company through the partial sale. In the past, Speedwell used a separate company for each project, each with its own investors and board of directors. “We were spending more time reporting than developing,” says Didier Balcaen.
With the support of Baltisse and Straco, the founders want to put a turbo on their growth plans. They have developed and are planning more than 150,000 square metres of offices, 23,000 square metres of industrial real estate, and over 6,000 apartments in Romania, a country that is popular with Belgian real estate firms. “In the future, our projects will be financed primarily by Baltisse and Straco,” says Didier Balcaen. “But the door remains open to other co-investors.” The founding duo retains a minority stake in Speedwell and remains operationally active.
‘Reasonable prices’
After Romania, Speedwell has expansion plans in Poland, where the founders started their real estate careers 20 years ago. Speedwell is negotiating the purchase of its first project around student housing in the capital Warsaw. According to Didier Balcaen, the Polish real estate market is currently performing much less strongly than the Romanian one.
“Poland is, more than Romania, dependent on external capital,” he says. “Because many investors have withdrawn from Poland, there are now good opportunities for sale at reasonable prices. So it is a good time to buy in Poland.” The Flemish developer Ghelamco, owned by Paul Gheysens, has also sold a significant amount of property in Poland in recent months.
“It is a good time to buy in Poland.”
— Co-founder Speedwell
Straco and Filip Balcaen also work together more frequently in real estate. Last year, they jointly acquired the Vertbois office building in Luxembourg. Baltisse Real Estate is active in Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Romania, and develops many logistics sites in the United States.
Straco Real Estate, led by Carl-Philip de Villegas (ex-IRET), owns the Ghent-based residential developer Odebrecht and holds a one-third stake in the Brussels developer Downtown. The company is also active in Luxembourg and Spain (student housing) and invests in Belgian retail real estate, including on Veldstraat in Ghent and Meir in Antwerp.
Filip Balcaen became a billionaire with the sale of his vinyl company IVC. De Raedt and Verheyden built their fortune with the medical laboratories of CMA-Medina, which were later sold. At the end of the 2022 financial year, their holding Straco had equity of €1.52 billion.
Source: De Tijd
Lukas Vanacker
15 April 2024, 12:31
