Capri EGM Finances, Acquires New Global Headquarters
The company does net lease deals a bit differently, but it results in cost savings for developers and tenants.
CHICAGO—Capri EGM, a Chicago-based investment company, has entered into an agreement to provide build-to-suit financing and acquire a state-of-the-art, global office headquarters for Syneos Health, a Raleigh, NC-based biopharmaceutical company. Capri specializes in corporate build-to-suit and sale leaseback financing and doing one of these deals in Raleigh makes a lot of sense.
“It’s one of the top tech markets in the US,” Shelby Pruett, chairman and chief executive officer, tells GlobeSt.com. “It’s a hotbed of innovation and has a lot of Tier One firms.”
The six-story, 258,000-square-foot building is already under construction. Syneos’ new Perimeter Park location sits at the confluence of I-40 and I-540, just minutes from Raleigh/Durham International Airport and adjacent to Research Triangle Park, a tech hub anchored by North Carolina State University, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The corporate profile of Syneos also makes this seem like an excellent long-term bet. “From our perspective, Syneos is a leader,” Pruett says. The company was created through the merger of INC Research and inVentiv Health, which allows its 21,000 employees to combine clinical research and commercial work. As a result, Syneos can quickly bring innovative drugs to the market. “We think this is an expanding field.”
“We’re most focused on first generation assets,” Pruett adds, meaning “net lease real estate that originates from the growth and future needs of expanding tenants.” And providing build-to-suit financing “gives us the opportunity to get in early. It’s something we do a little different from anyone.”
But this method provides good opportunities for everyone involved. “You essentially de-risk the project for the developer,” which has certainty about its capital needs and knows upfront that it has a buyer. The subsequent savings can then be passed on to tenants such as Syneos. And in this case, Capri ended up with a long-term net lease that includes contractual annual increases and provides for future expansion.
Such considerations may be more important than ever. Institutional investors have been pouring money into the US office market, and properties in top tech markets like Raleigh are on many wish lists. That level of competition has resulted in many record-shattering sales. But doing it Capri’s way, Pruett says, means completing deals without “artificially pushing up prices through a bidding process.”