Top Ires investors sell down stakes below Barings proposal price as deadline nears

Some of Ires Reit’s largest shareholders have sold down stakes at a discount to the price Barings has indicated it would be willing to pay for the group, locking in recent gains in advance of a formal bid deadline.

Boston-based FMR, Starwood Capital and Janus Henderson have sold most of their shares since the State’s largest private residential landlord announced on September 28th it had received a €726.9 million bid approach from a unit of Barings, the US-based alternative asset manager.

FMR, formerly Fidelity Management & Research, has slashed its stake to 3.34 per cent from 6.98 per cent, raising €22.5 million by selling 17.5 million shares at as much as €1.29. It has also “transferred out of” almost 1.5 million shares, according to a stock exchange filing this week, which did not provide any further details.

Representatives for FMR did not respond to requests for comment.

The price at which FMR has been selling is almost 22 per cent higher than where Ires shares were changing hands in late September, before the landlord announced it had received an approach.

However, it is below the €1.386-a-share Barings has proposed it would be willing to offer. Ires said as it announced the proposal that it “would be minded to recommend” a deal if a formal offer were made by a November 9th deadline set by the Irish Takeover Panel. Ires is led by chief executive Eddie Byrne.

US property specialist Starwood, which started building a stake in Ires in 2024 as the real estate investment trust (reit) was in the middle of a battle with an activist shareholder, has raised €13.7 million reducing its stake to 0.91 per cent from 2.92 per cent. A spokesman for Starwood declined to comment.

London-based Janus Henderson has sold 6.32 million Ires shares since the approach announcement for about €8.21 million, cutting its stake by more than half to 1.05 per cent.

Keyridge has reduced its stake to 3.21 per cent from 5.81 per cent, having been a net seller of shares since news of the Barings bid approach emerged. A spokesman for the firm also declined to comment.

The moves by some of largest Ires shareholders to sell down their stakes have allowed them to capture recent gains by the stock since the Barings approach was revealed while also derisking their positions before the so-called put-up-or-shut-up deadline next month.

Barings has been carrying out due diligence on Ires’s portfolio, which comprises more than 3,600 rental homes, since the announcement.

Shares in a number of other European reits, including Vonovia and TAG Immobilien in Germany and Finland’s Lumo Kodit, have fallen in value since news of the Ires approach, amid mounting speculation about how many more interest rate rises the European Central Bank will push through over the coming year to rein in inflation.

Ires’s largest shareholder, Thames River Capital, a specialist real-estate investment arm of Columbia Threadneedle, owns 8.13 per cent of the company. Its holding has been as high as 9.5 per cent since it disclosed it had breached the normal 3 per cent disclosure threshold early last year.

The Barings proposal, the fifth approach it had made since early August, before Ires made an announcement in September, would give the company an equity value of €726.9 million. Adding in Ires’s borrowings puts an overall value on the deal of almost €1.27 billion.

Barings survived the collapse of its then parent Barings Bank in 1995, resulting from rogue investments carried out by trader Nick Leeson, as Dutch financial giant ING acquired the group for a nominal sum of £1. ING later sold Barings to Boston-based MassMutual Financial Group in 2005.