Amundi has launched a senior real estate debt strategy with a €300 mln segregated mandate and a new fund targeting €500 mln.
The €300 mln mandate is for Crédit Agricole Assurances, a subsidiary of one of Amundi Asset Management’s shareholders and founders, French bank Crédit Agricole.
Fund raising for the pan-European debt fund has started and a first close on between €200 mln and €300 mln of capital is expected by July with a club of 5-10 European insurance companies and pension funds.
Both fund and mandate are managed by Bertrand Carrez, head of real estate debt strategy, who joined Amundi last September from La Française’s Acofi. He will draw on Amundi Alternative and Real Estate’s existing private debt and real estate divisions to support the new strategy.
Carrez said: ‘We are offering clients a combination of Amundi’s deep expertise in fixed income, where we are Europe’s leading platform, and in real estate – where we made €6bn of acquisitions in 2017.
‘We aim to raise between €350 and €500 million (for the fund) and are confident of being able to invest this swiftly, exploiting our relationships with players across eurozone senior debt. This should yield abundant deal flow and enable rapid deployment of capital while remaining highly selective in the quality of the loans.”
The loans will be mainly floating rate and from €20 mln-€75 mln in size across real estate sub-sectors, including office, retail, logistics and hotels. Carrez said that Amundi will make some bilateral loans, but many investments will be participations in bank originated deals. A formal partnership with Crédit Agricole CIB has been set up, whereby the bank will give Amundi priority for suitable deals.
While the strategy for Crédit Agricole Assurances is a core lending approach, the fund will target the core-plus market, at margins of 200-250 basis points over Euribor. Because of the different strategies, Carrez said, the two will not co-invest.
Amundi Alternative and Real Assets had €41.6 bn of AUM at the end of March 2018. The private debt division manages €6.5bn and Amundi Real Estate has €27.8 bn AUM.
