Capital One announced that it served as administrative agent, lead arranger, and bookrunner for a $81.2 million loan to a newly formed joint venture between Sentinel Real Estate Corporation and Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company. The borrower used the funds to acquire a 486,000-square-foot property housing Lenovo’s U.S. Global Headquarters Campus in Morrisville, North Carolina, part of the Research Triangle. Lenovo, one of the largest PC makers in the world, will continue to lease the property. Capital One will hold $44.3 million of the loan and has syndicated the remainder to Regions Bank. Seth Wiener, Senior Vice President in Capital One’s Melville, New York office, originated the transaction.
The facility is a three-year, interest-only, adjustable-rate term loan with two 12-month extension options. The property is a Class A, state-of-the-art corporate campus comprised of three buildings on 67-acres. It is located five miles from the recently expanded Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
Headquartered in New York, Sentinel Real Estate Corporation is an independently owned real estate management firm with $7 billion of institutional-quality real estate assets under management for 88 domestic and international clients. It is a long-time customer of Capital One.
“We are very pleased to be venturing with Mumtalakat on this first joint acquisition,” said John Streicker, Chair of Sentinel Real Estate. “Sentinel is very comfortable with the Raleigh-Durham market. We have been active investors in the region since the 1970s and maintain a regional office there. The stable, long-term growth exhibited by the region bodes well for this exceptional property. For the last decade and a half, Sentinel’s corporate strategy has been to align ourselves with sophisticated global investors. We find that these cross border alliances have growing importance as the world becomes more interconnected. We continue to learn from the fresh perspectives and new practices that accompany these partnerships.”
This transaction highlights Capital One’s capacity to draw on resources across the bank to advance the needs of its customers. “We worked quickly to structure the loan to accommodate a property with a single, noncredit-rated tenant and to find a syndication partner,” Wiener said. “This was done while conducting the required AML and KYC vetting triggered by the presence of foreign equity.”
This was Sentinel’s first joint venture with Mumtalakat, which has ownership interest in over 50 commercial entities worldwide with holdings in 11 countries. Its portfolio spans many sectors, including industrial manufacturing, financial services, telecommunications, real estate, logistics, consumer products, and education.