Germany’s largest pension fund, Bayerische Versorgungskammer (BVK), has bought residential assets in Japan and is close to acquiring an office tower in Australia.

The €80bn investor has bought 39 properties encompassing 1,500 residential units across Japan and is in exclusive due diligence to buy a AUD130m (€88m) office in Brisbane.

The pension fund is making the investments through two Asia-Pacific separate accounts.

One of the separate account managers, CBRE Global Investors, and BVK’s fund administrator Universal-Investment said they aquired the Japanese porfolio.

Meanwhile, industry sources told IPE Real Estate that Alpha Investment Partners, another separate account manager, has secured an exclusivity agreement with the owner of the Australian building, CorVal Partners.

“Due diligence will take about six weeks, and we are targeting to exchange contracts by the end of July,” one source said.

CorVal declined to comment, but it has previously said it fielded a dozen bids for the office building, located at Ann Street in Brisbane’s central business district.

Singapore-based Alpha Investment Partners, part of the Keppel Group, was unavailable for comment.

Bought for CorVal’s Value Active Fund No1 in 2012 for AUD75m, the building is 96% occupied and has a weighted average lease expiry of more than nine years.

Investors in the CorVal fund include Australia’s state-owned Future Fund, and two state government funds, the Victorian Funds Management Corporation (VFMC) and Funds SA.

BVK first entered the Australian market in 2015 when one of its investment managers, LaSalle Investment Management, bought an office tower in Melbourne’s Docklands on its behalf for about AUD80m.

The following year, through CBRE Global Investors, BVK acquired Melbourne’s South Wharf Tower from Deka Immobilien Global.

Last October, IPE Real Estate reported that BVK was planning to invest €3.6bn in Asia-Pacific property and European residential real estate.

BVK handed out specialised mandates to global fund managers, including Alpha Investment Partners, CBRE Global Investors and Arch Capital, in 2015 to buy assets in Asia-Pacific.

The new Japanese investments are located mainly in the Tokyo metropolitan area, as well as cities such as Osaka, Sapporo and Fukuoka.

Alexander Tannenbaum, managing director at Universal-Investment, said It was the third Japanese investment by CBRE Global Investors for BVK, and the fifth in Asia-Pacific.

He said the investments showed how much value German institutional investors place on geographical diversification.

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