IT ISN'T always cause for worry when billions are being splashed on property deals. Two big commercial-property transactions have been announced this week. On February 28th Ventas, an American real-estate investment trust (REIT) specialising in health-care facilities and housing for the elderly, agreed to buy Nationwide Health Properties (NHP) for $7.4 billion. And today Centro Properties Group, a debt-laden Australian group, announced a major restructuring plan, the centrepiece of which is the $9.4 billion sale to Blackstone of its portfolio of American shopping malls. 

The two deals are very different. The Ventas-NHP tie-up, paid for in Ventas shares, is about old-fashioned consolidation. There are lots of listed REITs and little happening in the way of new development. The deal follows other acquisitions by Ventas and will create the country’s largest health-care REIT, helping to diversify the combined group’s assets and reducing Ventas’s leverage. Inexorable demographic forces underpin the sector’s growth prospects: the baby boomers are starting to retire and America’s 85-plus age group is growing at three times the national average. 

The Centro deal is about escapology rather than strategy, the cycle rather than structural change. As well as offloading its American assets, the Australian group has reached agreement with its senior creditors to extinguish its debt in return for almost all of its Australian assets, too. If the restructuring goes ahead as planned, about $100m will be left over for Centro’s shareholders and junior creditors. 

The sale of the group’s portfolio of 588 strip malls in America is nonetheless an important moment in the commercial-property recovery. To date, institutional investors have been channelling money into high-grade, or “prime”, assets in America’s big, international cities, where demand is always stronger. The next stage in the industry’s recovery will be for that money to start flowing into secondary assets like Centro’s malls, whose anchor tenants are supermarkets and discount stores. 

That point has not yet arrived. But Blackstone is the type of opportunistic investor, on the prowl for buildings where it sees the potential for capital gains, which acts as a bridge between the distressed owners of today and the institutional investors of tomorrow. This is not the first investment it has made in shopping centres since the crisis but it is the biggest, and it had to fight off competition to land the assets. If the Ventas purchase is a reflection of American ageing, the Centro sale is a bet on the strength of American consumers.