UNITED STATES - Apollo Real Estate Advisors has attracted an additional $309m (€210.6m) for its commingled fund, Apollo Real Estate Finance Corp, and placed the new capital raising in a separate holding called AREFIN Co-Investment Corporation.

Bradford Wildauer, partner with Apollo, oversees the company's debt investments in the United States, and said thanks to increased interest in its debt offering the firm will be able to handle loan commitments of up to $250m.

"Our goal with the new entity was to be able to control our own destiny. The new entity will allow us the flexibility to handle large portfolio transactions," he said

Original investors in Apollo Real Estate Finance, including a mixture of United States and Europe pension funds, life companies, high net-worth individuals and fund of funds managers, were asked by Apollo to increase their initial commitments by 61% to build the new investment.

The vast majority of the existing investors did agree to do so, one such investor being Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System which made an initial commitment of $150m in May 2006 and then moved its total commitment to $241.5m earlier this year.

Some of the capital has already been invested as Apollo projects 40-50% of the fund has been placed in the market.

The Co-Investment Corporation has a strategy of investing in the US and Europe as an allocation of up to 20% of the fund can be invested in Europe.

Assets could then be used as the origination of development loans, as well as in redevelopment and repositioning through whole loans, B-notes and mezzanine loans.

The amount of leverage placed on the portfolio in the Co-Investment Corporation is 1 to 1 or less.

Apollo will mainly be looking at office, industrial, retail and apartments properties but may consider hotels some rebuilt condominium deals.

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