Australian M&A lacks big-ticket property deals, veteran banker says

[SYDNEY] Australian real estate has been tipped as the next sector to find favour from the country's booming market for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). There's just one crucial thing missing: big potential targets.

That's according to veteran banker Julian Biggins, who laments that large-scale M&A activity in the property industry is far easier to talk about than undertake.

"When you think about targets that are able to be taken out of the real estate market there's a handful, but it's not a long list," MA Financial Group co-chief executive Biggins said in an interview Thursday (Feb 17). "I would expect to see 1 or 2 this year, but I wouldn't expect to see a flurry."

The Sydney-based adviser and asset manager, known until recently as Moelis Australia, says the deal pipeline that reached a record last year, fuelled by a large and growing pool of pension money, is hampered by the lack of sizeable scale targets in the real estate industry. Still, his firm says the outlook for deals in 2022 on the whole is positive after a strong year and in comparison to other parts of the world.

Evidence of the limited opportunities for big investors, Biggins said, was hot competition for Blackstone Group's A$3.8 billion (S$3.7 billion) sale last year of its warehouse portfolio Milestone Logistics. BLOOMBERG

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