LaSalle Investment Management, the global real estate investment manager, has announced that the LaSalle E-REGI has exceeded €1 billion gross asset value as of 14 January 2020. The fund is expected to reach €1 billion in assets under management by Q3, 2020. In 2019, the fund generated total returns of 10.9%, driven by strong rental growth and successful sales, and has now recorded three-year total return figures of 8.7%.
The open-ended pan-European real estate fund, which was launched in 2011 via LaSalle’s regulated AIFM platform in Germany, passed the threshold after LaSalle E-REGI had successfully raised over €200 million in equity commitments, including five new institutional investors, in 2019.
LaSalle continued to deploy capital from the fund into office, hotel and logistics properties in transparent and high-growth European city regions in 2019, completing seven acquisitions with a cumulative value of €360 million.
LaSalle’s active management of the fund’s diversified core portfolio has enhanced the underlying properties’ sustainability credentials. The fund has been awarded the Green Stars award by the GRESB benchmark – the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark – for the second year in a row, for ESG real asset performance, and having achieved an occupancy rate of 97%.
The LaSalle E-REGI aims to generate stable income returns through investments based on a quantitative model, the European Regional Economic Growth Index (E-REGI), which has been developed by LaSalle since 1999 and identifies the cities and regions across Europe that have the greatest economic impact.
Measured against the MSCI S-FIX Europe benchmark of 76 institutional real estate funds with a combined net asset value of c.€29 billion, the LaSalle E-REGI has achieved outperformance of 5.3%, 2.3% and 2.6% respectively on a one, three, and five-year basis.
Uwe Rempis, Fund Manager at LaSalle Investment Management, said: “When launching the LaSalle E-REGI, our intention was to create a diversified pan-European property fund with exposure to transparent markets in the strongest-growing city regions in Europe. Reaching the €1 billion threshold is a testament to the attractive and important investment proposition the fund offers to our institutional clients.
“The team’s dynamic and proactive fund management has enabled us capitalise on market opportunities, to selectively sell assets, to achieve a record year and to extend our excellent track record in terms of fund performance. As we begin 2020, we will prudently grow the fund, we will remain focused on select investment opportunities in growth cities which we deem accretive to the fund’s target returns.”
Rene Hoepfner, Head of Client Capital DACH region at LaSalle Investment Management: “LaSalle has seen significant interest in LaSalle E-REGI from our pension industry investors. Our investors want a well-diversified core portfolio with both a long and strong track record, in combination with strong sustainability credentials, and we are dedicated to helping our clients achieve those goals. The LaSalle E-REGI has both unique investment characteristics and excellent performance. We expect more capital inflow from German institutions going forward.”