Vincent Tchenguiz, the property entrepreneur, is to sell his share in a £490 million Tesco supermarkets joint venture.

The sale will be followed by a refinancing of up to £700 million of Mr Tchenguiz's residential property to help to fund expansion elsewhere, The Times has learnt.

The financial rejigging at Mr Tchenguiz's Consensus Group comes amid growing concern over the ability of many highly leveraged private property investors to refinance borrowings on their assets this year as loan terms come up for renewal.

However, sources said that the company had good cashflows and was looking to generate what Mr Tchenguiz hopes will be substantial gains in capital values made on old acquisitions.

Tesco sold 12 of its stores and two distribution warehouses into a joint venture with Consensus in March 2005, valuing the portfolio then at £366 million. The properties are let back, with another 24 years to run, with rental rises tied to inflation.

It is understood that Mr Tchenguiz will refinance his share in the venture to cash in what could be up to £80 million of gains, before selling his entire stake.

The price for the Tesco assets will provide a marker for prime retail commerical property, as there have been no similar deals since last July,after which the credit crunch drove down values on all such sites.

This month, British Land, the property company, wrote down the value of its £1.4 billion supermarkets portfolio - containing a number of Tesco and J Sainsbury stores held in joint ventures - by 11.2 per cent between October and December.

These were the worst fallers in British Land's £14.6billion of commercial property. Their yield - the rent as a proportion of capital value - widened by 0.66 per cent.

Despite this, Consensus sources said that its Tesco joint venture would have held the £490million price put on the assets in November due to long leases tied to inflation.

“Nothing has materially impacted the long-term value on supermarkets since July if you sell to institutions,” an insider said.

Mr Tchenguiz is expected to use the same argument to try to persuade pension funds to invest directly in his residential freehold business. The ground rents for the 300,000 properties that he owns and the 300,000 that he manages are set for terms of up to 99 years.

The aspiration is to raise a mixture of new mezzanine debt and equity direct from insurance companies and pension funds into his residential freehold and flats management business.

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