Estates Gazette - 14 January 2006
Day nursery fund PINE gets Busy with first purchase
Day nursery fund PINE gets Busy with first purchase
The PINE Fund, which specialises in sale-and-leasebacks of day nurseries, has made its first purchase.
Busy Bees – which operates 52 nurseries around the UK – sold two Hertfordshire nurseries for £2m to the Jersey-based unit trust, launched last June to target the fast-growing nursery market. Busy Bees is leasing them back on a 30-year contract.
PINE’s principal investors are funds managed by Electra Partners Europe and Harry Hyman’s company Nexus Structured Finance. It intends to concentrate on purchasing and leasing back mature freeholds and portfolios of day nurseries with a minimum of 45 registered places from operators anywhere in the UK. Leases will be for between 15 and 30 years.
The day nursery market has been one of the fastest growing sources of employment in the UK over the past five years, with sector turnover last year in excess of £3bn.
Alan Proto, managing partner of the fund’s manager Nexus Pine, said: "There is a very strong pipeline of transactions set to complete in the early part of 2006. The fund is agreeing terms for sale-and-leaseback transactions with operators ranging from among the largest groups in the country to individual nurseries."
