Close Brothers Private Equity has provided the equity funding to facilitate the buy in / management buy-out of 12 freehold caravan parks from Bourne Leisure in a deal which values the new business, Park Resorts Ltd ("Park Resorts"), at £46m.

The deal will create the UK’s 2nd largest caravan park group operating established sites in a spread of good coastal locations around the UK. Recent trading performance by the group has been very strong with all sites fully sold out over the Easter period. A number of the sites have planning consent for the building of additional pitches, creating the scope for organic growth from the portfolio.

The Park Resorts sites, which were part of Bourne’s Haven Leisure business, offer between 350 and 650 pitches per site and were acquired by Bourne Leisure in October 2000 as part of their £700m acquisition of Rank Group plc’s holiday division. Bourne has already disposed of a number of the smaller sites acquired as part of that transaction.

CBPE is backing a strong BIMBO team consisting of David Vaughan (Chief Executive), Robert Sewell (Financial Director) and Alan Castledine (Operations).

David Vaughan was Operations Director of Haven Leisure from 1984-1989 and subsequently Managing Director of Rank Leisure and Rank Entertainment. Alan Castledine is currently the Operations Director of Haven Leisure, and Robert Sewell was Finance and Commercial Director, of Haven Leisure until April 2000.

Senior debt financing for the transaction has been provided by the Bank of Scotland.

Sean Dinnen, Partner of CBPE, who will join the board of Park Resorts, commented:
“This is a landmark deal for CBPE in the leisure and tourism market, one of our main areas of specialisation. The caravan holiday’s market continues to see good growth and represents a tremendous opportunity since less than 200 of the UK’s 3,500 caravan parks are corporately owned. This provides significant scope for consolidation within the industry – a process in which we see Park Resorts playing a leading role. This deal takes to 5 the number of investments made by our fund VI for which we aim to raise £200m this year.”

David Vaughan, Chief Executive of Park Resorts added;
“We are absolutely delighted to have completed the acquisition today and are looking forward to working with Close Brothers Private Equity in building Park Resort’s business as a leading operator of caravan parks in some of the UK’s prime holiday locations.”



Enquiries

Sean Dinnen
CBPE
Tel: 0207 426 4000

Andy Berry / Adrian King
Flagship Consulting
Tel: 0207 299 1500

Advisors:
To CBPE:
KPMG Birmingham (Due Diligence) – Graham Elsworth
Grant Thornton – Peter Gourd
Charles F Jones (Valuers)
Dickson Minto (Legal) – Martin McNair

To Park Resorts:
Richards Butler
Barlow Lyde & Gilbert