Diamond

Despite the many positive features of this building, our teams had to face some challenges along the way. Firstly, Ghent needed to be introduced as more than a secondary city in Belgium. In order to attract foreign institutional investors, potential buyers had to learn that Ghent is foremost the second most important city of Flanders in terms of office space.

Another challenge was the difficulty of managing the transaction structure knowing that it was a forward sale. Started in the summer of 2017, the Diamond building had however the benefit to be completely pre-let before delivery.

Therefore, our team have directly put the focus on creating some liquidity in order to build a competitive environment and on giving a detailed underwriting of the location to draw attention to the many strong points of the Diamond building.

After that, based on the timing of execution, the investor track record as well as the pricing recommended, our team decided to organize a competitive two round bidding process which resulted in finding the perfect candidate for this exceptional project.