Exclusive talks for private equity firm Pacific Equity Partners to buy Serenitas are understood to have broken down, with sources suggesting that the local private equity firm’s fully funded bid for the lifestyle communities business was not to the vendor’s liking.
DataRoom understands that Serenitas owners had granted PEP exclusive due diligence to buy Serenitas for about $906m, but after completing the due diligence, the terms and value of the private equity firm’s proposal were rejected.
PEP was to buy the business through its Secure Asset Fund, which targets investments valued at between $50m and $1bn in various industries such transport and logistics, waste, utilities and renewables, data and telecommunications, social and agricultural infrastructure.
Serenitas is owned by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and has been on the market through investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Private equity has been drawn to the land lease community space given that it caters to the growing ageing population.
Existing investments in PEP’s secure asset fund include Agright, Zenith Energy and Intellihub.
Parties that are said to have taken a look earlier at Serenitas included Mirvac Group, Macquarie, Brookfield, Hometown, Stockland and Warburg Pincus, but most were thought to have walked away.
GIC owns 95 per cent of Serenitas and founder Rob Nichols owns the remainder, and expectations earlier were that GIC was looking for a price of at least $800m.
The business was formed when GIC and Tasman Capital Partners bought Western Australia-based National Lifestyle Villages in 2018 from Navis Capital and Blackstone.
It owns various land lease communities, including Thyme Lifestyle Resorts, National Lifestyle Villages, which is the market leader in WA, The Vantage at Vasse, The Outlook at Albany, RV Homebase Fraser Coast and a pipeline of communities under development for over-50s land lease living.
Manufactured housing estates work where an operator owns the land and rents the site to residents, who buy the relocatable home for the site.
Owned by groups such as Ingenia and Serenitas, they are growing in popularity as they are seen as a way to address housing affordability challenges.
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