The new year got underway for Denmark’s PenSam with revelations of two large investments the labour-market pension fund had just completed in residential property.
The DKK185bn (€24.8bn) institutional investor added to its portfolio a 18,824sqm block of flats in the Copenhagen suburb of Herlev, and a near-20,000sqm residential building located in Rødovre, to the west of the capital city’s centre.
Jeppe Starup, PenSam’s head of private capital and real assets, told IPE Real Assets the pension fund was looking to increase its allocation to residential in the Danish market due to three factors – the overall urbanisation trend, rising demand from tenants in greater Copenhagen, and better market conditions.
Denmark’s biggest commercial pension provider, PFA, meanwhile, ended 2024 with news that its climate-tilted pension product, PFA Klima Plus, had generated higher returns over the year than its standard product – 19.6% versus 13.9% based on certain customer profiles and figures logged just before the year-end.
Group CIO Kasper Ahrndt Lorenzen remarked that the return for the more climate-friendly pension had been strong in a year when part of the green sector had been hit by declining investment appetite.
In Norway, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) – manager of the country’s giant sovereign wealth fund – urged the Council of Institutional Investors (CII) to go further in opposing unequal voting structures at companies.
Apart from discouraging boards from agreeing to “stealth dual-class structures”, NBIM said in a consultation response that the CII could also consider elaborating on what should be done about such structures boards had already entered into.
Alecta in Sweden announced changes in mid-December to the huge defined benefit (DB) pension scheme it runs, which will increase the chances of surpluses being handed over to employers, as well as reducing the scheme’s equity exposure to 30% from 35%.
Given the size of Alecta’s DB assets – SEK1.03trn (€89bn) at the end of September – cutting five percentage points from it equities exposure would mean the disposal of SEK51bn of equities. That equates to around 0.5% of total Swedish stock market capitalisation.
Items to note:
- The IPE Real Estate Global Conference & Awards 2025 event will take place in the Danish capital on 22 May at Villa Copenhagen.
- Danske Bank’s life and pensions subsidiary has changed its name back to Danica, from Danica Pension, from the beginning of this year as part of a new commercial strategy.
Rachel Fixsen
Nordic Correspondent
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