SWITZERLAND - Direct real estate investments failed to help Swiss pension funds' performances in the last quarter but quite the contrary dragged returns down compared with earlier periods, according to a study which does not track the impact of property investments.
According to the State Street Pensionskassenindex, Swiss pension funds returned -0.48% in the third quarter, which is a much better figure than the -1.6% recently calculated by Credit Suisse. (See earlier IPE article: Swiss funds fall 1.6% in Q3)
In earlier quarterly studies, the State Street index had shown a significantly worse performance because its study of pension fund holdings and their asset classes does not include direct real estate holdings by Swiss pension funds. (See IPE story: Swiss returns slump to -8.38% without property)
However, over the last three months the Swiss bond index SBI which returned 4.34% has significantly outperformed the real estate index KGAST Immo with 0.96%, Markus Wirth, board member at State Street Switzerland, explained to IPE.
He noted "this might be the reason" for the better figure in the State Street index but stressed this was an assumption not based on a detailed analysis on the figures.
State Street said this was the fifth negative quarter of returns for Swiss Pensionskassen bringing the performance since year-end 2007 to -8.82% - compared with 6.62% as calculated by Credit Suisse.
"The market recovery in July and August was only a short-term recovery," noted Reto Tschäppeler, vice president of State Street Switzerland.
He added even if the statutory minimum return rate was to be lowered from 2.75% to 2% "this goal will stay out of reach for many funds".
The good news according to State Street is the transaction costs Swiss pension funds paid for security trading dropped in the last quarter from 22.44 basis points to 21.84bp.
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