Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund (PERF) intends to invest up to $1.7bn (€1.5bn) in real estate this year.

Tony Breault, senior investment officer for the Oregon State Treasury, which oversees the investments for Oregon PERF, told IPE Real Assets that the pension fund’s investment plan for 2022 will be focused on opportunistic and value-add closed-ended funds and separate accounts in either the core and value-add sectors.

“We are very happy with the performance and makeup of our core open-ended portfolio will not be adding any new managers or filing any redemption requests in this sector for the coming year,” Breault said.

Oregon PERF intends to make commitments worth between $150m to $300m each during the period.

The pension fund is also planning to research core international partnerships for a possible new strategy beginning next year.

“We are starting this potential new investment strategy as a diversification play, Breault said.

“With taking into consideration of our staffing, we will likely start off with investing capital into core open-ended funds that will be investing capital in either Western Europe or in Asia.

“Our long-range goal here would be to have this strategy eventually make up 10% of our real estate portfolio,” said Breault.”

Breault also said the decisions on how soon to sell a portion of the pension fund’s office exposure is a difficult one.

“Our current exposure to the property type is in the range of 24%. Our long-term goal would be to get it down to somewhere in the range of 10% to 15%.”

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