Finance Growth with Sale & Lease-back

How to Finance Growth Without Taking on Debt or Losing Control: Sale & Lease-back, a Strategic Lever for Business Leaders

In a context of tightening bank credit, operational real estate becomes a source of immediate and controlled liquidity. Rising costs, stricter lending conditions, industrial and environmental investment needs—business leaders are facing increasingly complex financial trade-offs.

In this environment, Sale & Lease-back emerges as a strategic solution, enabling companies to free up cash while retaining the use and operational control of their sites.

Objective: Turning a Fixed Asset into a Strategic Financing Lever

Sale & Lease-back helps business leaders transform a fixed asset into a strategic financing lever without weakening their industrial model.

Sale & Lease-back: Principles and Benefits for Companies

Sale & Lease-back involves a company selling its real estate asset to an institutional investor while remaining a tenant through a commercial lease. This approach offers several key advantages:

Immediate cash generation to finance growth, acquisitions, production upgrades, government-backed loans (PGE), HR recruitment, or AI investments.
Improved financial ratios (gearing, EBITDA).
Tax optimization of operating expenses versus limited-time depreciation.
Guaranteed operational continuity.
Diversified financing sources and partial disintermediation from banks.

This solution allows business leaders to regain control over their financial strategy without compromising their industrial operations. In the industrial sector, real estate is often critical, specialized, and immobile—precisely factors that enable long-term leases and create value for both the company and the investor.

Proven Expertise in a Structured Market

Over nearly twenty years, more than twenty significant Sale & Lease-back transactions have been completed, totaling around €1.5 billion. These involved industrial, logistics, and office assets, with a focus on corporate strategy and safeguarding industrial interests.

These operations have included strategic sites of major industrial groups, confirming the market’s maturity and the growing interest of institutional investors in assets secured by long-term leases.

Notable transactions include:

Airbus site in Saint-Médard-en-Jalles (€115M, 85,000 m² of offices, industrial, and logistics facilities)
Naval Group industrial site in Gassin (34,000 m², €50M)
Danone Vitapole site in Palaiseau (€37.7M, 29,090 m²)

These examples demonstrate that Sale & Lease-back is not limited to standard assets. It also applies to complex, specialized, and mission-critical industrial sites—provided they are analyzed with a rigorous strategic and industrial approach.

Tailored Support

The success of a Sale & Lease-back transaction relies on a network of specialized partners: technical engineering firms, environmental consultants, lawyers, tax advisors, and more. These project teams, adapted to each client’s needs, offer business leaders a wide range of solutions:

How to optimize their real estate portfolio?
How to adapt properties to regulatory changes, such as the tertiary decree?
How to turn real estate into a strategic lever for the company?

Sale & Lease-back is an innovative and secure solution for business leaders who want to finance growth without taking on debt or relinquishing control of their assets. With proven expertise and personalized support, it transforms real estate into a lever for sustainable performance.