L&G merges property and infrastructure into one team

Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) has brought its direct investment capabilities in property and infrastructure in one team for the first time.

Bill Hughes, managing director of Legal & General Property (LGP) since 2007, has been promoted to head of Real Assets to lead the combined team.

The news comes as part of a major restructure of LGIM’s leadership team, as it looks to drive future business growth across its key product areas, both in the UK and internationally.

Hughes has overseen the doubling of the company’s real estate assets under management, growing from about £7.5 bn in 2008 to over £15 bn (€18.1 bn) at end-2014. He also led the establishment of its lending arm, Commercial Lending Limited (CLL), which has concluded a total of £1.08 bn of debt deals to date across 12 transactions.

In the past two years, LGIM’s infrastructure team has concluded around £800 mln of loans across 11 deals.

COMMENT
Commenting on his appointment, Hughes said, 'Demonstrating L&G’s continued commitment to being at the forefront of sophisticated understanding and investment into new emerging sectors, this change allows us to further capitalise on the synergies that exist across our infrastructure and property businesses. Like real estate, we recognise that infrastructure offers attractive inflation protection and stable yields against which we can match our long-term pension liabilities. With an indebted public sector, institutional investment in this area will be a differentiator for future UK economic growth and success.'

TOP DEALMAKERS
LGP was ranked as the 26th largest manager of real estate in Europe, based on its 2013 AUM of €14.2 bn, in the October 2014 edition of PropertyEU's Top Investors publication. Thanks to its prolific investment progamme LGP ranks as one of the most active investors in our rankings based on buy and sell activity. LGP announced on 7 January this year that it had completed over £4.1 bn (€5.3 bn) of property transactions in the UK market in 2014.

Last year, LGP was ranked in 8th place in our ranking of most active investors following €3.2 bn of transactions in 2013.