Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System is backing The Carlyle Group’s latest real estate opportunity fund.
The pension fund confirmed to IPE Real Estate that it plans to commit $100m (€93.3m) to Carlyle Realty Partners VIII.
It is a follow-on investment for Tennessee Consolidated which committed $50m to the previous fund in 2015.
Other investors in the fund include the Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana, which is also committing $100m.
Tennessee Consolidated said: “Carlyle will continue to deploy a successful opportunistic strategy for US real estate that has been pursued in predecessor funds.
“The strategy focuses on identifying assets that will be positively impacted during periods of moderate economic growth and those that will be positively impacted during periods of high economic growth – and shifting the relative weighting towards these criteria based upon where the US is in the economic cycle.”
Carlyle, which did not comment, is planning to raise between $4bn and $5bn for the fund.
Tennessee Consolidated, which has tended to make most of its real estate investments through separate accounts, has also bought two grocery-anchored shopping centres.
It paid $38.5m for the 103,853 sqft Raley’s Center of Elk Grove in Sacramento through a separate account managed by Barings Real Estate Advisors.
It also bought the 115,180 sqft Cahaba Village Shopping Center in Birmingham, Alabama for $31.1m through L&B Realty Advisors.
The pension fund is also looking to sell assets that it has held for a long time.
Among these is the 142,156 sqft office building in Bellevue, Washington, which Tennessee Consolidated has owned since 2007.
The Commons 90 building, which is managed by Clarion Partners, was bought for $41.2m at the time.
