La Française Forum Real Estate Partners (LFF Real Estate Partners) has joined forces with specialist retail asset manager Realm to launch a new UK shopping centre fund.
La Française Forum Real Estate Partners (LFF Real Estate Partners) has joined forces with specialist retail asset manager Realm to launch a new UK shopping centre fund.
The fund is targeted to reach £400 to £500 mln (€600 mln) of assets over a three-year investment period and will target core-plus assets with a lot size of £35 to £100 mln.
It will be LFF Real Estate Partners' second retail fund. The firm currently co-manages the Pan European Retail Fund (PURetail), a joint venture with Aberdeen Asset Management in continental Europe, with total equity commitments of €160 mln from five institutional investors. PURetail invests in urban (high Street) retail and has assets across its three target markets of Germany, France and Sweden.
Realm, led by managing director Colin Brooks, currently manages over 2.5 million sq ft of retail and leisure assets in the UK for mainly institutional investors.
David Rendall, CEO of LFF Real Estate Partners, said: 'We are delighted to have teamed up with Realm to develop a product at what we believe is an exciting time in the retail sector. Shopping centres require specialist management and our product is designed to provide investors with exposure to a segment of the market on which it is difficult to capitalise without these skills.'
La Française Forum Real Estate Partners (LFF Real Estate Partners) is the European direct real estate arm of the La Française-Forum platform. It was established in January 2014 through the joint venture acquisition of Cushman & Wakefield Investors (CWI) by La Française and Forum Partners. With offices in London, Frankfurt and Paris, LFF Real Estate Partners specializes in direct commercial real estate investing across Europe and provides institutional and retail investors segregated products as well as a co-mingled investment vehicle, PURetail.
The combined platform has total assets under management amounting to close to $20 bn, of which $14 bn are direct core Europeanreal estate investments.