Allianz Real Estate has appointed GE Capital Real Estate's former CEO Asia-Pacific Francois Trausch as new CEO per January 2016.

Allianz Real Estate has appointed GE Capital Real Estate's former CEO Asia-Pacific Francois Trausch as new CEO per January 2016.

He will take the helm from Olivier Piani who will retire by the end of this year.

Trausch, who will be based in Paris, has overseen GE’s real estate investment, financing and portfolio activities across the Asia-Pacific region since 2010. Prior to that, he spent 15 years with GE in Europe in various senior real estate positions.

Before joining GE, Trausch worked for Tishman Speyer in New York and Berlin and for Goldman Sachs in London.

'Thanks to its global organization and the extraordinary quality of the team, Allianz Real Estate has been impressively successful in expanding its widely diversified real estate portfolio to €37.4 bn over the last years,' said Trausch. 'It will be my ambition to further develop the well-positioned real estate business of Allianz.'

The German real estate asset manager announced last week that it plans to almost double its real estate portfolio to €60 bn in the next three years.

‘Today, our property portfolio totals €37.4 bn but we’d like to grow it – on the equity and debt side – to €60 bn by 2018,’ the company’s CIO Olivier Téran said. ‘In the first nine months of this year alone, we invested €1.2 bn in Europe,' he added.

Allianz Real Estate has invested €3.3 bn worldwide this year, of which €1.4 bn was invested in real estate either directly or indirectly with an additional €1.9 bn committed to real estate lending, according to the group’s head of European real estate finance, Roland Fuchs.

Speaking at Allianz Real Estate’s media roundtable at Expo Real in early October, Fuchs noted that the insurer has spent €1.15 bn on debt in Europe so far this year. 'The European loan portfolio now stands at €3.3 bn – we have doubled it in the past two years,’ Fuchs said.

Currently, real estate accounts for about 4% of Allianz’s overall portfolio.