Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is going ahead with plans to invest $250m (€228m) in real estate funds, despite growing economic and market uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pension fund will commit $200m to the open-ended diversified fund CBRE US Core Partners and $50m to the value-add apartment fund Waterton Residential Property Venture XIV.

Kansas PERS told IPE Real Assets: “As an institutional investor with a very long-term time horizon, the system deems it prudent to continue to deploy capital in a well diversified portfolio, expecting that current financial market volatility may present attractive investment opportunities.”

Last week, Douglas Weill, co-founder and co-managing partner of Hodes Weill, told IPE Real Assets that many US pension funds were continuing to make real estate commitments where they were already at advanced stages.

Kansas PERS is investing in the CBRE Global Investors fund as part of plans to ramp up its investment in core real estate in 2020. It had originally planned to invest $130m in core real estate over three years, but now wants to invest $350m this year alone.

The move is in line with a decision in January to increase its target real estate allocation from 11% to 13% and withdrew its investment from another open-ended vehicle, the UBS Trumbull Property Fund.

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