Baucenter bought the Akvarel shopping center in the Moscow region

The Russian structure, controlled by the owners of the French retailer Auchan, closed a deal to sell the Akvarel shopping complex in Pushkino near Moscow to the anchor tenant of the facility, the Kaliningrad DIY chain Baucenter. Retail chains rarely buy out leased space. But due to the attempts of foreign property owners to leave the Russian market, experts predict that there will be more such transactions.

Information about the closure at the end of spring 2023 by New Immo Holding (the Russian structure of the family of the founder of the French retailers Auchan, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon Gerard Mullier) of the transaction for the sale of the premises of the Aquarelle shopping complex in Pushkino near Moscow, Kommersant found in reports published the other day companies. It states that ownership of the facility has been completely transferred to Baucenter Rus, the store manager of the Kaliningrad-based DIY retailer of the same name.

The Ceetrus company (as New Immo was previously called) announced the opening of the complex in Pushkino in 2019. At the same time, it was reported that Baucenter was chosen as the anchor tenant of the facility, for which this was the first hypermarket in the Moscow region. The details of the transaction are not disclosed in New Immo’s financial statements. The company did not answer Kommersant’s questions. It was not possible to get comments in Baucenter.

A Kommersant source familiar with the situation says that the possibility of buying out Aquareli by Baucenter has been discussed since the construction of the facility with a leasable area of ​​​​about 15 thousand square meters. m. The director of the department of commercial real estate NF Group Evgenia Khakberdieva does not exclude that the conditions for the possible purchase of the object were recorded in the lease agreement.

The source of Kommersant estimates the amount of the transaction at least 500 million rubles. He believes that Baucenter paid the funds in installments and it is possible that the entire amount was transferred to the seller before the start of the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict. According to him, in the spring of this year, the registration in the Rosreestr of Baucenter’s property rights to the facility was fully completed.

The consultants interviewed by Kommersant have not heard about the sale of other real estate objects owned in Russia by the Mullier family structures – and this is most of the area where Auchan stores are now located. This network continues to operate in Russia. In May, Vedomosti reported that the French holding was looking for a buyer for Decathlon’s Russian business, naming Turkish FLO Retailing and Lebanese Azadea as among the contenders, traditional buyers of brands leaving the Russian market.

Even before the events of February 2022, the company was selling its assets, notes Evgenia Khakberdiyeva. In her opinion, New Immo could have decided to sell the Aquarelle shopping complex in order to remove its operating costs.

Since the early 2000s, retailers have minimized the acquisition of retail space, including leased space, says Olga Antonova, partner at the Commonwealth Partnership. For networks, this was a cost optimization strategy. But the situation may change, the expert believes: “Considering that many foreign companies are trying to get out of part of Russian assets, the number of such transactions may increase again in the foreseeable future.” According to a Kommersant source in one of the DIY networks, the purchase of retail space now allows retailers to reduce the cost of renting premises.

Khalil Aminov, Alina Savitskaya