Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) has made about $400m (€359m) worth of new real estate commitments, half of which it said is being put into industrial funds.
The $203bn pension fund told IPE Real Assets that it has put $150m into the RREEF Core Plus Industrial Fund and $50m into the Targeted US Logistics Fund, managed by DWS and Prologis, respectively.
The reason for this move is that industrial property is “showing strong fundamentals through the growth of the e-commerce business”, Florida SBA said.
As previously reported, Los Angeles County Employees’ Retirement Association helped launch the RREEF Industrial Fund, as a cornerstone investor, in June 2017. The open-ended fund is intended to grow to $2bn in size through third-party capital raising.
Target markets for the fund include Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami and New York/New Jersey.
DWS told IPE Real Assets that the fund pursues both core and non-core industrial “assets that are located in land constrained, key barrier to entry markets that are in close proximity to large population bases”.
The open-ended Prologis core US fund has a total value of $7.9bn, according to the real estate investment trust’s quarterly earnings report.
Prologis holds a 27.2% ownership stake in the fund.
Florida SBA has made a €100m commitment to BlackRock Europe V, which is targeting a €1.25bn fundraise, and a $100m commitment to Blackstone Real Estate Partners IX, a fund expected to raise $20bn.
