REAL ESTATE - Investors including four major Danish pension funds have committed E310m in the first closing of the global real estate fund in Europe to invest in non-listed property funds. (This article first appeared on www.IPERealEstate.com.)

The investors - SEB Pension, JOP, academic fund MP Pension and Pen-Sam - see the Sparinvest property fund of funds as a means to invest primarily in US and European real estate, with secondary investment in Asia.

MP-Pension managing director Uffe Wang said the fund took the hard work out of investing overseas.

"We've moved into fund of funds abroad to get another kind of asset," he said. "We already have a very large real estate portfolio. Alone, we would have to do all the work of investing in overseas real estate ourselves. This was a more convenient way of doing it."

Former Danica Pension chief investment officer Bo W Jensen, who heads the Sparinvest investment team, expects the fund to grow to E500m before its final closing in June this year.

Retail and office real estate will take up most of the portfolio, though the fund will also allocate a smaller part to residential and logistics.



Topics