Bayerische Versorgungskammer (BVK), Germany’s largest pension fund group, is doubling its investments in real estate ‘secondaries’ by striking up a strategic partnership with Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Goldman Sachs and the €107bn BVK have established €300m fund to acquire stakes in real estate funds and make other transactions on the secondary market.
The partnership has been launched six months after BVK entered another €300m real estate secondaries partnership with StepStone Real Estate.
Earlier this year, Manuel Wormer, head of global real estate investment management at BVK, told IPE Real Assets: “BVK sees real estate secondaries as the last remaining untapped route of real estate investing.
“We have been studying the real estate secondary market over many years and find it to be a large and growing element of the market that can offer risk-adjusted returns, diversification and a host of other attributes that complement our portfolio.”
Commenting on the new partnership with Goldman Sachs, Wormer said: “Real estate secondaries investing is quickly establishing itself as a staple in major institutional real estate portfolios.
“We believe that the diversification that the strategy offers across underlying property types and vintage years, combined with strong structural tailwinds that will result in GPs and LPs continuing to seek liquidity solutions, make this an accretive addition to our real estate portfolio.
“We are excited to be partnering with Goldman Sachs given their established platform and long track record in the secondaries market.”
The latest partnership will be run by Goldman Sachs’ specialist secondaries business and administered by Universal Investment.
Goldman Sachs’ most recent real estate secondaries fund closed in 2020 with $2.75bn (€2.61bn) in commitments.
Igor Ostrowski, managing director at Goldman Sachs, said: “We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with BVK, who we view as one of the leading real estate investors.
“This fund builds on our long-standing experience in real estate secondaries that has seen us deploy over $6bn across more than 100 transactions in the space since 2010 and will allow BVK to gain access to an exciting segment of the secondaries market that continues to evolve and grow meaningfully.
“We believe that BVK will benefit from our strong position in the market driven by Goldman Sachs’ broad scope of global real estate expertise as well as our size and ability to move with speed and certainty of execution.”
