REAL ESTATE- Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System has issued a commitment to invest capital into the Broadway Partners Real Estate Fund III.
This investment will be put into the pension fund’s value-added component of its real estate investment program.
The amount to be invested is equal to 25% of the committed capital for the commingled fund. It can’t be more than $300m (€224.3m). The pension fund made this investment decision based on the recommendation by its real estate consultant, Courtland Partners.
The commingled fund is being sponsored by Broadway Real Estate Partners. This will be the third commingled fund that it has raised. Real Estate Fund I was closed in July of 2005 with a total equity contributions of $211m. Real Estate Fund II was concluded last October. The total raise was $588m.
Pennsylvania Public School feels good about the office market. The pension fund believes that that the office market in the United States is strong and is expected to remain robust over the next several years. Vacancy in the major markets across the country has recovered and some markets now have historically low vacancy rates.
Real Estate Fund III will be acquiring office buildings. These assets are either A or high quality B properties that have an identifiable leasing advantage over the competition and are inefficiently priced by the market.
Broadway will be looking for deals in markets that feature strong short-term supply and demand fundamentals for leasing and where they is a lot of institutional investor interest for future acquisition activity.
The real estate fund manager will be looking at a variety of markets around the country. The initial targeted markets for the fund will include the New York metropolitan area, Northern and Southern California and Washington, D.C.
