Real Estate focused hedge funds
I've seen threads on this, but they are quite outdated at this point.
Was wondering if anybody could provide current examples of real estate focused hedge funds, similar to what Land & Buildings does. Pretty niche area so difficult to find these without direct knowledge of them.
Quite a few REPE firms will invest in public securities if the valuations are attractive. Starwood is an example of a firm which does this. They have taken an activist role in CA Immo an Austrian listed real estate company for example. Also for some large funds they will invest in public equities to 'complete' a portfolio. If you want to invest in data centres but dont want to scale up a platform for example.
However dedicated public equity groups focussing on real estate are managed in a very different way to what a REPE fund would be. Usually public REIT investment groups are benchmarked to the FTSE EPRA NAREIT Global Index or the NAREIT Index and aim to beat this benchmark by a certain amount - they are mostly relative value accounts.
Some are outcome orientated where they seek to provide a return of 6-8% over the long term with a higher income component to mimic physical real estate market returns but with added liquidity.
Finally there are some pods at MM hedge funds where traditional L/S market neutral strategies are run and there have been larger scale institutional products which do this also. CBRE Clarion still run a L/S strategy and BMO Asset Management also run one, Starwood used to run a product. But there is an issue in regards to liquidity for these strategies so they are not hugely economic. Hence the focus on bog standard relative value accounts.
Having worked in physical real estate and the public equities side, if you get real estate and get finance you can move between the two. Modelling on the equities side is focussed on 3 statement models and REITs are very simple to model.
Big dedicated real estate securities platforms: CBRE Clarion, LaSalle, CenterSquare IM, Heitman, Brookfield, BlackRock, Cohen and Steers, Janus Henderson, Principle, BMO AM, Morgan Stanley AM, JP Morgan AM etc.