Norton Rose Fulbright has acted for Blue Sky Group in a student accommodation joint venture with Goldman Sachs.

Our Brisbane-based team negotiated and documented the joint venture arrangement for the acquisition and development of student accommodation sites throughout Australia and New Zealand. The 50/50 joint venture had an initial stage that required Goldman Sachs to contribute sufficient equity to buy a 50 per cent interest in three existing development sites owned by Blue Sky or funds that it managed.
 
Our early work on the deal included entering options over a number of properties identified by Blue Sky as suitable for development as student accommodation. This work required due diligence, documenting the option arrangements and acting on the purchase of the properties.

More recently we were engaged to act for Blue Sky in relation to the Goldman Sachs joint venture. That involved advising in relation to the large suite of documentation required to effect a complex joint ownership and management structure for the existing, and soon to be acquired, properties, including their development and ongoing management.

Norton Rose Fulbright partner Michael French commented: 

“The ownership and management structure conceived by the parties was extremely complex and our challenge initially was to ensure that the matrix of documents was able to adapt to that structure. As the existing properties were held in separate funds managed by Blue Sky, we also needed to balance the individual rights and interests of the existing investors in these funds as part of the broader joint venture. All of this needed to be done in a compressed timetable in order to meet the strict deadlines for the deal.”

Michael French led the deal and was assisted by partners Marshall Bromwich and Joshua Paffey.