GE Real Estate seeks Finnish property buys: report

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Property investor GE Real Estate (GE.N) is seeking to buy a large property portfolio in Finland, including the possibility of buying a local firm, its chief executive was quoted as saying.

GE Real Estate made a bid for Finnish government-owned company Kapiteeli last year but lost out to Finnish property group Sponda (SDA1V.HE), which paid about 950 million euros ($1.3 billion) for Kapiteeli in October.

"We are not interested in single properties, but we want to buy a large portfolio in Finland," CEO Michael Pralle told Finnish financial daily Kauppalehti.

"We lost Kapiteeli, but we will try again," he said, adding that it would be ideal to buy "local know-how".

Pralle said his company's real estate portfolio was worth about $60 billion and that the goal would be to increase it to more than $100 billion in the next few years.

"We are aggressively buying property in other Nordic countries," he said.