Shipshape

JUST an hour south-west of London, in the upper reaches of the Hamble River, hundreds of little masts gently bob up and down in Swanwick marina. “You’ve got to think of it as a car park on water,” explains Rupert Boissier of Premier Marinas, which looks after this and seven other marinas dotted along the south coast, Britain’s sailing mecca. With 5,170 berths, each rented out for several thousand pounds a year, the group of marinas generates lots of cash. Its owner, a property fund run by BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has also been able to increase its value, by upgrading space used for building boats (yielding £4 per square foot in rent) into shops and offices (£16 per square foot). The marinas even have planning permission for residential units on some of their 385 acres of land and water. But the most attractive aspect of the investment, according to Marcus Sperber of BlackRock, is the finite supply of coastline and building permits: only two marinas have been built on Britain’s south coast over the past 15 years.

BlackRock, which manages $23 billion of property around the world, is better known for buying offices in New York than marinas in Hampshire. But as capital has flooded into property in search of decent yields, the obvious investments are starting to look relatively expensive again. Hence the hunt for “alternative properties” such as Swanwick marina. These are outside the conventional property classes (office, retail and industrial) and include things like student housing, data centres and casinos. BlackRock owns 150 British doctors’ surgeries, for instance. AXA Real Estate, the property arm of a French insurer, manages over €2 billion worth of alternative properties in Europe, including 82 hotels, police stations in Sweden, care homes in Germany, petrol stations in Spain and data centres in several countries.