State Universities Retirement System of Illinois (Illinois SURS) has selected Blackstone and The Carlyle Group to be its two core-plus real estate fund managers.
In December last year, IPE Real Assets reported that Illinois SURS planned to redeem $400m (€326m) from the UBS Trumbull Property Fund and reinvest $300m in core-plus strategies.
The pension fund said it will now put $200m in Blackstone Property Partners and $100m in Carlyle Property Investors. The latter was launched in September 2015 as part of the opportunistic fund manager’s plans to branch out into core-plus real estate investments.
Blackstone, which launched its first real estate core-plus fund in 2014, declined a request for comment.
As reported earlier, the US private equity firm’s core-plus real estate business has grown from zero to $27bn in four years, according to its 2017 end-of-year figures. It earned a 12.7% net internal rate of return during the year.
Carlyle Property Investors, which is also an open-ended fund, seeks is targeting a net internal rate of return of 9% to 11%.
It will be investing in a mixture of traditional and specialist property types in the US.
