UNITED STATES- Indiana Public Employees Retirement Fund has selected ORG Portfolio Management as its first consultant dedicated to the real estate asset class.

Courtland Partners was the other finalist in its real estate consultant selection, but the pension fund decided at its August board meeting to bring in ORG as its real estate specialist.

The new real estate consultant will work as an extension of the Indiana PERF investment staff to identify investment opportunities and evaluate performance in the real estate market.

Most of the work performed by ORG will be in the area of value-added and opportunistic real estate strategies.

Indiana PERF is already working with Mercer Investment Consulting, acting as a general consultant, and its principal Allison Yager had been working with the pension fund on its real estate portfolio. She still could still be involved with the fund on some core investments that the pension fund might be looking at.

Indiana PERF has a 3% targeted allocation for real estate though the full amount which can be in invested at any time ranges from 0% to 5%.

The pension fund has already made investments in a variety of real estate strategies on both the private and public side of the business.

The investments made for private real estate have been through commitments into commingled funds, and through a combination of funds with either a core or opportunistic strategy.

Indiana PERF has also hired two firms for a public REIT strategy.  The managers for this strategy are INVESCO Real Estate and European Investors.

The pension fund's real estate portfolio was valued at $119m (€80.8m) to May year, equivalent to 0.8% of the investor's $15.75bn in total assets.

That said, this figure does not include real estate commitments made earlier this year as there has been no capital call as yet for $75m commitments to Colony Credit Opportunity Fund and Walton Street Real Estate Fund VI.

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