AXA Real Estate has raised more than €1.5 bn as it seeks to build Europe’s largest commercial real estate debt fund.
AXA Real Estate has raised more than €1.5 bn as it seeks to build Europe’s largest commercial real estate debt fund.
AXA has set a target of €2.5 bn, primarily sourced from insurance companies and pension funds, for its Commercial Real Estate Senior 9 Fund, its fourth co-mingled real estate debt fund targeting European third-party institutional investors.
The fund has received €3.7 bn of commitments from 11 institutional investors in the UK, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, comprising nine third-party clients and two AXA insurance companies.
AXA has created a new structure for the fund, allowing capital to be recycled back into it once it has matured, as well as setting up a specific feeder fund issuing rated notes which will allow German regulated investors to participate in a further closing expected in the first quarter of 2015.
The latest fund raising comes shortly after AXA was awarded a separate €250 mln CRE investment mandate by a Dutch insurance company, bringing its total platform to around €10 bn.
AXA Real Estate invested €3.6 bn in commercial real estate debt in 2014, including the acquisition of a €900 mln share in a multi-billion Spanish loan portfolio disposed of by a major European bank.
Isabella Scemama, head of fund groups at AXA Real Estate, said: ‘At over €1.5 bn, the significant size of this latest tranche of commitments clearly demonstrates how real asset finance has now become an accepted asset class with a specific allocation from most institutional investors.
‘The point is further underlined by both the increased number of investors committing to this fund raise and the growth in the size of their allocations, as well as the fact that there was demand from our clients for a product which allowed capital to be recycled.’
AXA Real Estate Investment Managers is Europe’s biggest real estate portfolio and asset manager, with more than €54 bn of assets under management and more than 160 third-party institutional clients worldwide.
