The six freehold Waitrose stores were acquired via a sale and leaseback transaction with Waitrose & Partners for £74.1m in early July, capital for which came from SUPR’s oversubscribed £140m equity raise from April this year on which Macfarlanes also advised. A mortgage for five of the stores was later secured with an accession to an existing £100m revolving credit facility with HSBC.

The Tesco supermarket in Newmarket, Suffolk was purchased for £61m on 24 July. Tesco has a long history of trading from this 9-acre site, which was originally developed in the 1980s and completely rebuilt in 2016, and it offers 68,000 square feet net sales area. To finance this acquisition, Macfarlanes advised on a five-year £60m revolving credit facility with Wells Fargo, a new lender for SUPR.

SUPR acquired a Morrisons supermarket in Telford for £14.25m on Friday, 7 August, which was funded by an increase in SUPR’s existing facility with Bayerische Landesbank to £86.9m, and a mortgage over this supermarket has since been secured with an accession to the Wells Fargo revolving credit facility.

The Macfarlanes team was led by real estate partner Nick Barnes and finance partner Colin Morgan with assistance on the financing side from solicitor Laura Uberoi and on the real estate side from senior solicitors Rebecca Ashton, Tania Barnes, Alicia Hickman and Isabella Dierden-Hunt and solicitors James Rees, Gwen Llewelyn Atkinson, Sindhuja Shriananda and Erin Gilliland. Tax advice was provided by tax and reward partner Jeremy Moncrieff and solicitor Sophie Walshe. 

Nick Barnes comments: “It was great to assist Supermarket Income REIT once again with this series of acquisitions. It was a tight turnaround and we were happy to be able to complete the eight acquisitions and related financings over the past month.”