UNITED STATES - Ohio Public Employees Retirement System has approved new commitments totaling $600m (€412.4m) into the core open-ended JP Morgan Strategic Property and the UBS Trumbull Property funds.

The pension fund is investing a further $300m each into the commingle funds, having first allocated $200m to the Strategic Property Fund in 2004 and to the Trumbull Property Fund in 2007.

These two commingled funds are considered to be among the top performing open-ended commingled funds in the United States as they were the only two open-ended commingled funds to pay out redemption queue requests in 2009.

JP Morgan Asset Management has paid out $300m of redemption queue requests for the Strategic Property Fund over the past 12 months, although this queue has actually dropped from a high of $2bn down to approximately $900m.

The fund itself now has total assets under management of $10bn and JP Morgan is currently out in the market looking, for the most part, for well-established and well-leased core properties.

Similarly, the UBS fund had a net asset value of $6.8bn at the end of Q3 2009 and invested in the four core fields as well as hotels.

Investment staff at Ohio PERS expect both fund managers to draw down the new commitments sometime this month.

The defined benefit pension fund had invested 7.4% of its total plan assets in real estate by the end of November 2009 - just below its 8% targeted allocation for the asset class.

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