Arrow in the Algarve: The UK Finance Firm With a Growing Portfolio in Portugal
Arrow Global, the opportunistic investment firm which celebrates its 20th birthday in 2025, has been widening its golf footprint by acquiring several of Portugal's finest courses and resorts.
Arrow, the formerly publicly traded company which specializes in opportunistic investments — ranging from real estate to distressed loans to ceramic floors — is increasing its golf footprint in Portugal after the acquisition of one of the country’s most respected courses, the Monte Rei Golf & Country Club in the Algarve.
The acquisition was notified to the Autoridade de Concorrencia, the Portuguese competition authority, earlier in January.
The acquiring company is listed as ACO II May S.À R.L., a Luxembourg-based company that’s part of the Arrow Global Group, and the takeover will see the assets of seven separate companies — all operating under the Monte Rei Golf & Country Club brand, and which also includes “a set of tourist accommodation enterprises” — move into control of the Arrow subsidiary.
The status of the authority’s decision is listed as “ongoing”, with observations on the acquisition invited to the competition authority within 10 days of the notice, which was made on January 16.
More about Monte Rei
Monte Rei’s website proudly claims that its North layout, a Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course, is “Portugal’s No. 1 golf course”.
The course is quite a recent addition to golf in the Algarve, having seen its first tee-shots in 2007, and the sense of a vibrant and up-and-coming resort is underlined by developments on its second layout, the South, which has also been designed by Nicklaus and team and where it’s believed construction has recently begun.
Enhancing the golf experience, Monte Rei boasts state of the art luxury accommodation to suit all tastes, with villas (per its website) “designed and built to the highest specification [providing] an enviable place to live and play in a private and secure hideaway.”
Additional facilities include “high-end dining, 24/7 concierge service, heated swimming pool, gym, tennis courts and children’s play area”.
A quote attributed to Nicklaus back in 2010 reads,
“The golf experience at Monte Rei begins with a gorgeous piece of property. There were a number of wonderful trees throughout the site and a lot of movement on the property. That movement gave us a lot of ability to work through the valleys to create some wonderful strategy and shot values.
We were not restricted with what we did there, so that allowed us to be creative but true to the land. The elevation changes also give the golf course spectacular vistas or views… certainly anyone who has the opportunity to play Monte Rei is in store for a wonderful experience.”
You might say, “Well, he would say that”.
A quick glance at reviews on Booking.com — where the property has received an excellent 8.8 rating (“Fabulous” in Booking.com terminology) from 146 reviews at the time of writing — shows that Nicklaus’s sentiments are echoed by many of those who have visited.
One reviewer, Matthias from Germany, compared Monte Rei favorably to three of the world’s most recognizable courses:
The Monte Rei acquisition is just the latest in a series of moves by businesses within the Arrow portfolio in Portugal.
The announcement came in the same week as the competition authority issued a non-opposition notice to the acquisition of Thai-owned Minor Luxury Hotels Vilamoura — the 5-star Anantara Vilamoura Resort — by Vilamoura World Holdings, or VMH, another of Arrow’s Portuguese companies.
But who is Arrow? And how does golf fit into its strategy?
Here’s a little more background.
Arrow — going public
Arrow will celebrate its 20th year in business in 2025, and it’s fair to say it has had quite the eventful two decades of operations, which included eight years as a publicly-traded company.
It was founded in 2005 by Zach Lewy, an economics graduate from Princeton University and born dealmaker, who remains as Group CEO and Chief Investment Officer.
His profile page on Arrow’s main website credits Lewy with (emphasis mine):
“transforming it into a leading Pan-European investment manager specialising in private credit and real estate. Under Zach’s leadership, Arrow manages more than €110 billion of serviced assets across Western Europe and generates alpha across alternative asset classes, including opportunistic credit, real estate, and lending.
According to that page, Lewy has supervised more than 3,000 deals in his time in charge. He was also, alongside Arrow senior leadership colleague Tom Drury, the recipient of an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2013 in the business products and services category.
The company’s long-established focus is on opportunistic credit — defined by alternative investment leader GCM Grosvenor as “a variety of fixed income instruments that seek to capitalize on dislocations in credit markets and mispriced/misunderstood credits [and which] often complement, or serve as a substitute for, traditional fixed income investing”.
Arrow’s stated hallmark is:
“to invest opportunistically, moving between European geographies, asset classes and positions in the capital stack as we evaluate evolving risk/return dynamics”.
This approach led to it landing a series of deals following the global financial crisis which started in 2007, a time of major upheaval in the financial markets and which, within the next few years — as recession and various governments’ austerity responses hit hard — saw large portfolios of non-performing loans sold off the balance sheets of over-leveraged high street banks.
That timeframe, the global financial crisis and its aftermath, led to such growth that Arrow decided to float on the London Stock Exchange in 2013. According to a contemporaneous report in the London Times, flotation day marked a cash bonanza for Lewy and then chief executive Drury, who collectively sold shares worth more than £10 million and also retained a significant interest in the public company.
That report also gave an insight into the type of business that had led to Arrow’s rapid growth in the eight years from foundation to public company:
“Arrow, based in Manchester, specialises in buying loan books where the borrower is in default or arrears. Spending more than £100 million a year on acquiring loan portfolios, it has been growing rapidly and manages assets with a face value of about £8 billion. Although it buys and owns the loans, it contracts out the debt collection to a third party.”
Arrow — going private
Having floated at just over £2 per share, Arrow hit a high of £4.80 in 2017 before dropping to lows of around £0.63 per share in 2020.
The company was delisted from the London Stock Exchange in October 2021 when it was purchased by British private equity firm, TDR Capital, a milestone which coincided with, or was perhaps the main reason behind, a significant change in the overall firm’s focus from distressed debt to real estate and the management of physical assets, including luxury resorts, hotels and golf courses.
TDR, which was founded in 2002, is not exclusively focused on those type of businesses, but it’s fair to say its attention is heavily trained on tangible assets and recognizable brands, with its investments including significant interests in everything from the British supermarket chain Asda (which it took over in a £6.8 billion deal in 2020) to petrol stations to online used car marketplaces to chicken fast food to pets.
A glimpse through Arrow’s portfolio
While the complete corporate structure is intricate, spread across dozens of companies and at least five different EU countries, as well as the United Kingdom, as of January 2025 the extensive list of companies within the Arrow stable still includes a number of firms that are heavily focused on finance:
Mars Capital, a loan servicing firm acquired in 2017, for “an enterprise value of £15.5 million”. Mars Capital now services more than €9 billion of assets in Ireland, many of which were part of tranches of loans sold by Irish lenders and which fell into arrears and default during five years of recession and austerity budgets in Ireland.
Europa Investimenti and Parr Credit, two Italian servicers of non-performing loans, in 2018 for a total equity value of more than €80 million
Maslow Capital, a provider of real estate development finance, which it acquired in 2022
Eagle Street, a real estate asset manager and developer focused on commercial property, residential, hospitality and life sciences in the UK and Ireland, in 2023
On top of that, it also owns a growing range of Portuguese companies, many of them focused on golf and hospitality.
Arrow’s golf and hospitality focus in Portugal
Like Ireland and Italy, Portugal was a fruitful market for companies keen to take distressed loans off the balance sheets of high-street lenders, and that marked the entry-point for Arrow into that market soon after its 2005 launch.
Arrow’s Portugal arm’s interests include:
Whitestar (a debt servicing firm)
Hefesto (credit securitization)
Nexor (affordable housing finance)
Restart Capital (corporate restructuring)
Norfin (real estate investment management)
With all this and lots more — including those two golf and hospitality acquisitions notified to the competition authority in recent weeks — Arrow’s Portuguese website seems to be well within its rights in declaring that it owns “a number of companies of national importance”.
Befitting the broader group’s opportunistic approach to business in multiple markets, Arrow’s Portuguese strategy has diversified away from debt and into real estate and hospitality in recent years.
Quoted in Hospitality Investor in 2023, John Calvao, principal of Arrow Global's funds, spoke proudly of the company’s Portuguese success:
“That’s one of the great things about our platform; a lot of investors come and go, but once we target a market, we stay. We’ve been in Portugal for 18 years.”
As part of this commitment to the Portuguese market, Arrow has been snapping up golf resorts and hotels in Portugal for a number of years.
Prior to the moves for Monte Rei and the Anantara resort in Vilamoura notified to the Competition Authority in recent weeks, in July 2023 Arrow announced a major deal which included a significant portfolio of courses and hotels in Vilamoura, Lagos and the Portuguese island of Madeira.
That acquisition brought six hotels under the Dom Pedro brand, including three in Vilamoura, into the Arrow portfolio, as well as what it described as “five flagship Vilamoura golf courses – Old Course, Pinhal, Laguna, Millenium, and Victoria”.
The portfolio also includes Details, a platform responsible for managing the Hospitality, Sports & Leisure domain of Arrow in Portugal, including all its golf resort investments in Albufeira, Carvoeiro and Vilamoura.
A wider look at golf in Portugal
All these investments are both contributing to, and benefiting from, the rapidly growing appeal of golf in Portugal to residents and visitors alike.
According to an article in TeeTimes, a source of golf news in Portugal and Spain, a recent study conducted by EY’s global strategy consulting arm on behalf of both Portugal’s national tourism body and national golf industry body (the Conselho Nacional da Indústria do Golfe, or CNIG) gave insights into significant economic impact of golf on the Portuguese economy.
Between 2019 and 2023 — four years that were, of course, blighted by the impact of Covid-19 on travel and tourism — the direct and indirect contribution of the golf sector to the Portuguese economy remarkably increased by 57%, to €4.2 billion in 2023.
The report found that the golf industry contributed €120 million directly to Portugal’s GDP in 2023, with golf in the Algarve region a nine-figure industry on its own.
Visitors from the UK, Sweden, Germany and Ireland see Portugal as a perfect golf getaway, and Faro, the capital of the region, has also been gaining prominence in international travel — the airport will get its first direct flights from the USA in May 2025, when United Airlines begins its Newark-Faro route.
All in all, tourism in general in this part of the world, golf tourism in the Algarve in particular, and much of that luxury golf tourism, appears to be booming.
So don’t expect investment, whether that’s contracting Jack Nicklaus and his design team or seeing more acquisitions from international private equity funds land on the desk of the Portuguese competition authority, to stop anytime soon.
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane