Sovereign investors turn more to real estate, remain wary of UK

Sovereign investors are raising their property exposure at the expense of low- yielding bonds in an attempt to boost returns, but Brexit is seen as a significant negative for all UK investments, a study by asset manager Invesco showed.

The annual report, published Monday and based on interviews with 97 sovereign wealth funds, state pension funds and central banks with more than $ 12 trillion in assets, found sovereign investors underperformed their target returns by 2 percentage points on average in 2016.

What Invesco defines as “investment sovereigns,” which have longtime horizons and higher return targets, fell short by 3.7 percentage points, and “development sovereigns,” which encourage domestic growth, underperformed by 3.1 percentage points.

Governments are also paying less into the funds – on average, the equivalent of 5 percent of assets under management in 2017, down from 8 percent in 2015. This is forcing investors to seek out higher yielding as- sets such as high- grade office and commercial real estate.

Over two- thirds of sovereigns were overweight global real estate in 2016 and 46 percent expect to be overweight again in 2017. Safe- haven markets such as North America and Western Europe were preferred.

Exposure to home market, real estate is also growing, particularly among Western and Asian sovereign investors, due to the depth of the local markets. Home markets are seen as more familiar and accessible.

New property investments are mainly funded out of fixed income holdings, with 48 percent of respondents citing this.

The focus on real estate is partly driven by the fact that accessing other illiquid assets, such as infrastructure and private equity, remains difficult.

Deploying money into infrastructure is now expected to take four years, up from 3.5 years in 2016’ s survey.

Real estate is unchanged at two years.