Only two European fund vehicles feature in Preqin’s 2014 league table of private equity real estate managers that have most consistently outperformed their peers.
Only two European fund vehicles feature in Preqin’s 2014 league table of private equity real estate managers that have most consistently outperformed their peers.
Funds managed by Helsinki-based CapMan Real Estate and Stockholm-based Sveafastigheter both rate a mention, but overall, North American funds dominate the league table with New York-based Blackstone Group and Dallas-based Lone Star Funds also making the list this year.
Preqin is the leading source of information for the alternative assets industry.
The absence of European fund managers in the list is not only down to performance, according to Andrew Moylan, head of real assets products at Preqin. The league table comprises only closed-end private equity-style real estate funds which are naturally more prevalent in the US. In Europe, there are far more open-ended funds and other structured real estate vehicles. As such, this league table has a larger weighting towards US managers.’
Another reason, he said, was that US-focused real estate funds have performed better on average than their European counterparts over many recent years. Preqin has produced a table highlighting the median net IRRs for private equity real estate funds by focus for the 2002-2013 vintage which clearly highlights this point, he added.
Moylan attributed the outperformance of the Scandinavian funds to the fact that the region has been a bastion of economic stability in the past few years. ‘The real estate markets in the region did not suffer to the same extent as much of the rest of Europe during the downturn. Given that the economic recovery in many European economies has lagged behind the US, the recovery in real estate has also lagged this. 'But,’ he added, ‘there has been a significant improvement in the performance of European funds in recent years.’
