Mutualidad de la Abogacía intends to find a buyer that will pay the 150 million euro it demands for BBVA’s head office in Bilbao and has mandated BNP Paribas Real Estate to find a buyer and close the transaction of the historical building located at number 12 Gran Vía in Bilbao, according to El Confidencial.
At the end of last year, Mutualidad de la Abogacía carried out a closed process, to which it only invited a few institutional investors. None of the offers came close to the 150 million euro it intended to receive, which led the mutuality to rethink its strategy and choose an open process.
At the beginning of the year, the Mutualidad de la Abogacía invited Spain’s main consultants to present their proposals so as to win the mandate for the transaction. In the end, the French entity was the chosen one and it now has in its hands one of the year’s most important office operations, both in terms of price as in terms of the building’s iconic character.
The centennial building is BBVA’s operating headquarters within the Basque Country and its largest commercial office in Spain, with 22.000 sqm and a leasing contract which still has one more mandatory decade, which guarantees a yield of around 4.5%.
The entity presided by Carlos Torres sold this building, along with 160 more buildings and branches in 2009 to RREEF, a real estate fund owned by Deutsche Bank, for 364 million euro. Only a year later, the German vehicle sold the iconic building for 100 million euro, which provided the buyer at the time, with a 6.5% yield.
