US: Ascott Residence Trust (ART) will acquire a freehold 548-bed student accommodation asset, named Seven07 in Champaign, Illinois, for US$83.25 million (S$112.4 million).
Seven07 serves around 56,000 undergraduate and graduate students from the nearby University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
The transaction, which is expected to be completed in mid-November 2021, will be funded by debt and part of the proceeds from ART’s private placement launched in September 2021. The acquisition of Seven07 follows ART’s recent acquisition of Wildwood Lubbock in Texas and is ART’s fourth student accommodation investment within 10 months this year.
Beh Siew Kim, CEO of Ascott Residence Trust Management Limited said: “ART continues to ramp up our investments in the longer-stay segment to build stable income and the resilience of our portfolio. Seven07 is operational and will start contributing stable income immediately upon acquisition. The student accommodation asset is 100% occupied for AY 2021, with lease terms of about one year. For the AY 2022, Seven07 is about 50 per cent pre-leased with strong rental growth of about eight per cent over AY 2021.”
