Dutch schemes have backed the €9.4bn Dutch property investor Bouwinvest Real Estate Investors to raise €395m for its residential and retail funds during the first half of the year.

Bouwinvest said the €25bn sector scheme for road transport (Vervoer), the €9.5bn pension fund for the hospitality industry (Horeca & Catering) as well as charity Elisabeth Strouven Fonds have committed €300m in total to its €4.8bn Residential Fund.

Martijn Elsakkers, portfolio manager at Horeca & Catering said that his scheme had also invested €60m in the €900m Retail Fund in order to rebalance its 10% property portfolio.

“With an allocation of approximately 3.7%, our non-listed indirect holdings were under-weighted relative to our strategic allocation of 4.5%,” he explained.

The pension fund focuses its investments in non-listed indirect property on the Netherlands, with strategic allocations to residential and retail of 60% and 40%, respectively.

Earlier, Horeca & Catering had committed €100m to Bouwinvest’s Residential Fund. The scheme has also limited allocations to offices and business accommodations.

Willem Brugman, chief executive of Vervoer, said it had invested in the Residential Fund to benefit from the illiquidity premium on direct property, but declined to provide details about the scale of the investment.

Recently, the transport scheme also took an undisclosed a stake in the retail fund of ASR.

Brugman confirmed that the investments had in part been financed with the proceeds of the divestment of its infrastructure holdings, which amounted to €150m at the start of last year.

The pension fund sold its 0.6% stake in infrastructure as it was too small to contribute sufficiently to its returns while still requiring monitoring, he explained.

According to Brugman, Vervoer was still extending its holdings of Dutch direct real estate to the strategic allocation of 3.6%. At March-end, its stake was 1.5%.

Bouwinvest is the property investor of BpfBouw, the €58bn pension fund for the building sector.

Both its Residential Fund and its Retail Funds have been opened to other institutional investors and have attracted other 16 pension funds so far.

Last year, the funds generated 15.6% and 7.8%, respectively.

Bouwinvest has indicated that it wanted to increase its assets under management to €13bn in total by 2020.

 

Related Companies