The €10.2bn pension scheme has increased its investment in the ASR Dutch Science Park Fund by €30m to €45m, with the fund investing in offices and laboratories for start-ups and scale-ups around Dutch universities and scientific institutes.
Pension fund KPN has increased its investment in the ASR Dutch Science Park Fund by €30 million to €45 million. The fund invests in offices and laboratories for start-ups and scale-ups, among others, and as such contributes to science development in the Netherlands.
That makes the KPN scheme’s investment in the real estate fund an impact investment, said trustee Caspar Vlaar. In 2021, the pension fund made an initial investment of €15m in the Dutch Science Park Fund, which has existed since 2019. It invests in real estate in science parks around Dutch universities, companies and scientific institutes. The office spaces in these buildings are rented out to innovative companies. The new investment increases the fund’s assets under management to €260m.
The KPN fund made the investment four years ago because the real estate fund is ‘very closely aligned’ with the three impact themes that the pension fund considers important. These are climate and biodiversity, technology and sustainable production and consumption.
Vlaar said: “When we had just invested, I visited one of the science parks and randomly walked into one of the offices. The guys who rented it turned out to be working on an innovation that automatically switches off wind turbines at sea when a flock of birds comes close.”
Ecosystem
According to Vlaar, the fund has now sufficiently proven that its risk-adjusted return is comparable to that of other real estate funds in the pension fund’s portfolio. It is therefore now receiving an additional investment.
“Moreover, the investment risk may even be smaller, because the fund has many relatively small tenants. This means that they are not dependent on one or a few large tenants. Tenants also often stay put for a relatively long time because they are part of a certain ecosystem that you can’t just set up again somewhere else,” he said.
The Dutch Science Park Fund distinguishes itself from other real estate funds in the fact that potential tenants are selected in consultation with the “ecosystem partner” (a university, company or scientific institute), said fund director Martin Kraaij.
“As a result, it can sometimes happen that we decide together that a certain potential tenant is not the right match for the ecosystem we want to build,” he added.
There is a risk that ensuring tenants are the right match for the park could lead to higher vacancy rates. “You might think that it is improper to refuse tenants, but in practice we see the opposite effect,” Kraaij said. He added that the park tends to see “fewer vacancies than in other places, precisely because of the selection process which creates an attractive ecosystem”.
