The Santa Barbara County Employees’ Retirement System is planning to move its targeted allocation for real estate from 8% to 10%, according to a board-meeting document.
The new allocation was set after an asset-allocation review by the pension fund’s investment consultant, RVK.
One of the asset classes where the pension fund will be lowering its allocation is emerging/frontier market equity, going from 11% to 7%, as the pension fund is significantly overweight emerging market equities, which has the highest expected volatility.
Santa Barbara County is still deciding how it will invest the new capital.
Ellen Hung, assistant chief executive at the pension fund, said: “We have not formulated a strategy for the new capital. This is something we will be working on with our consultant over the next several months.”
The pension fund invests in a variety of strategies, reflected in the two benchmarks it uses for its real estate portfolio.
According to a board-meeting document, 61% of the benchmark is the NCREIF ODCE Index, with the other 39% being the NCREIF closed-end value-added index.
The pension fund’s real estate portfolio is valued at $195m (€177.5m), or 6%, for private real estate and $31.9m, or 2%, for public real estate, based on allocations at the end of July.
Santa Barbara County has mostly backed funds on the private side and used separate accounts for public real estate.
The private real estate portfolio usually involves a mixture of core, value-add and opportunistic, through funds investing in the US and abroad.
These strategies are part of the pension fund’s 2016 investment plan for real estate approved in February.
The amount to be invested for the year was $24.5m.
Capital would include $5m in core through public securities, $15m in value-add/opportunistic that includes $5m in international funds and $4.5m to re-invest dividends in core open-ended funds.
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