UNITED STATES - RV Kuhns & Associates has become the latest general investment consultant in the United States to have its own real estate team.

The company has lured three people way from real estate consultant Courtland Partners - consultants Dan Krivinskas and Michael Paolucci and associate consultant Roman Nemtsov.

All three will continue to work in the Cleveland area, where they were located when working for Courtland but will then open up a new regional office for RV Kuhns in the Chicago region over the next few months.

RV Kuhns is known in the investment arena as a general consultant for a variety of institutional investors, including pension funds, and has helped to place a significant amount of capital into real estate for clients over the years.

That said, a large amount of work has gone to other real estate consultants such as Townsend, Courtland and Mercer, among others, so RV Kuhns is hoping to keep some of this business at home through the additional arm of the business.

One of the pension fund clients it already works with, for example, is the Teacher Retirement System of the State of Illinois which has significant real estate holdings valued at $4.73bn (€3.24bn) to the end of June 2007. Its targeted allocation for the asset class is 14%, while 11.3% has so far been invested.

RV Kuhns currently works with more than 200 institutional investors across the US.