Campus Living Villages group managing director John Schroder. Photo:

Big super takes the scenic route to Campus Living exit

Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood, Emma Rapaport|6 hours ago

Campus Living Villages’ four superannuation fund owners know they’ve got a hefty cheque coming their way, and they’re not too fussed about when it arrives.

Campus Living Villages group managing director John Schroder.

Eight months after this column reported CLV’s four superannuation fund owners – Hostplus, Rest Super, Equip Super and NGS Super – had called in Goldman Sachs to test bidder appetite for its 27,100-bed student accommodation portfolio, the sale process is moving at glacial pace.

Street Talk is told Goldman powered through a set of meetings with potential investors last month, targeting infrastructure-minded parties. Sources said strategic bidders and rival student housing operators have been left out of proceedings, at least for now.

All indications suggest Goldman is running a tight, selective process, which is not surprising given Campus Living identified several potential acquirers in an auction run by UBS in 2016. However, it is unclear if the restructured CLV has succeeded in snagging a motivated bidder or three, and whether the stage has been set for a second round.

CLV was shopped with 45,000 beds and a $2 billion price marker by UBS in 2016. That process targeted real estate and infrastructure investors, and attracted a bid from real estate group Greystar, while Macquarie Capital tried to put together a consortium. However, seven months later the buyer hunt was called off, amid questions around whether CLV’s global portfolio needed to be broken up to attract bidders.

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The business was founded in Sydney in 2002, where it runs accommodation campuses at Sydney University and UNSW. However, it has expanded extensively and the United Kingdom and the US are now both bigger than the Australian business.

Players in Australian student accommodation sector include Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Macquarie Capital, which invested in Iglu Student Accommodation in 2014. UniLodge has a partnership with Australian Unity and MaxCap, and Nuveen has backed The Switch.

Last month, GIC agreed terms to sell a 5662-bed Australian student accommodation portfolio for a $1.6 billion gross price to South Carolina-based Greystar, as revealed by this column. It represented about three-time return for GIC’s dealmakers, who had secured the investment for about $568 million from Singapore-listed real estate investment firm Wee Hur Holdings in 2022.

Under the deal, the $225 billion Future Fund had committed to taking up a significant portion of Greystar’s equity raise.