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Sales of commercial real estate by occupiers accounted for almost 20% of the European investment market last year, and will remain an important part of the weakened market in 2009, CB Richard Ellis has said.

Figures released by the international property adviser show that owner-occupier sales came to EUR 22.2 bn last year, 19% of the total, despite a sharp fall-off in the amount of public sector real estate sold. Owner-occupier sales totalled EUR 45.9 bn, 18.6% of the total volume, in 2007. Back in 2006 sales by owners totalled EUR 34 bn, 14.7% of all transactions.

As in 2007, there were some very high-profile sale and leaseback transactions during 2008. Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit each sold corporate real estate assets valued in excess of EUR 800 mln in the latter part of 2008. CBRE said this continued a trend of bank property sales set at the beginning of the year by Banco Santander's disposal of its Madrid HQ, the final part of a multi-stage disposal.

The property adviser said that large transactions involving banks were far from the only sale-and-leaseback activity in the market. In total there were around 600 transactions involving sales by owner-occupiers in 2008. The average deal size was around EUR 33 mln, only slightly larger than the EUR 28 million average lot size for the market as a whole. Transactions took place across the full range of property types, including offices, shops and industrial space. The geographic range was also wide, with deals recorded in 20 of the 26 European countries covered by the data.

The geographic spread of sale-and-leaseback transactions has broadened significantly over the last few years. Two years ago the biggest three markets (Germany, UK and France) accounted for 70% of all sales by owner-occupiers. In 2008, the top three markets (Germany, UK and Spain) made up only 59% of total activity.