Real estate investment firm Delancey has expanded its mandate with one of the UK’s largest corporate defined-benefit pension schemes, providing up to £400m of additional investment capacity for UK real estate.
The additional value-add commitment takes its investment mandate with the unnamed pension scheme to just under £1bn.
The capital is available for immediate deployment and will target sector-agnostic, value-add opportunities to complement the scheme’s existing portfolio.
The further investment follows Delancey’s repositioning and rightsizing of the portfolio since taking over management in December 2022, using its ‘proactive core’ approach. This focuses on active asset management, conviction investing, sell discipline, bespoke structuring and ESG.
Dan Berger, chief investment officer at Delancey, said: “We measure ourselves by whether we deliver what our client set out to achieve. They backed our ‘proactive core’ approach to revitalise their portfolio in 2022, and subsequently we’ve delivered three years of outperformance against the MSCI Quarterly Property Index.
“The decision to provide a further £400m of investment capacity is a strong endorsement of that progress. Our focus now is on deploying that capital responsibly and delivering the same level of performance and service on behalf of the scheme’s members.”
Since the company’s establishment in 1995, Delancey and its management team have acquired, developed, managed and sold in excess of £20bn of real assets and property-related investments.
Last week, Delancey, on behalf of a client, secured a deal for Unit 520, a 43,000 sq ft building under construction at Proxima Park in Waterlooville, Hampshire, for rubber products manufacturer and distributor Polymax.
Earlier this month, it also sold two shopping centres on behalf of a client to US-based real estate investment and asset management firm The Ardent Companies, in an all-equity purchase.