Report of the management board
Corio’s focus remains on growing income from its retail portfolio. After selling the Dutch office and industrial portfolio in 2008, Corio’s retail exposure went from 83% to 92% (by value) at the start of 2009. Further sales of offices in France and investments in retail lifted this percentage to 94.
Fighting the adverse economic environment Corio again achieved strong net rental income growth on continuing operations of € 19.3 million in 2009, up 6.1%, and like-for-like growth of 1.8%. This growth came in above our target, which was to at least keep pace with consumer price inflation of 0.3% in the Euro Area and/or nominal growth in retail spending in the EU-15 countries, which averaged 2.0% negative. Financial markets remained difficult in 2009, especially in the first half. This led to another yield outshift. The strong rental growth compensated the loss in value due to the higher yield. In the second half of the year when yields began to stablise we returned to ‘net-profit-territory’. Due to the acquisition of Príncipe Pío in Madid, Corio España was even able to achieve an upward revaluation over the second half. Over the full year Corio recognised a 6.4% negative revaluation of € 389.7 million on the total portfolio.
Caution was still the key word in managing the pipeline. Over the full year we cancelled three projects for a total amount of around € 188 million. These projects were cancelled because their (profitability) profiles no longer met our requirements. Other projects were renegotiated, some of them were still in that process at year-end. The completed renegotiations resulted in a net initial yield of between 50 and 100 basis points. The fixed committed part of the pipeline showed a net initial yield of 6.8% compared to 7.1% a year earlier.
Source: Annual Report 2009, Chapter Overview & Strategy, page 15 (PDF, 13.679 kB)
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