Adia is world’s top realty investor
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a leading sovereign wealth fund, has $62.1 billion in assets under management.
dubai — Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia), a leading sovereign wealth fund, is the world’s top real estate investor with $62.1 billion in assets under management, a research report said.
Indosuez Wealth Management’s Real Estate Pulse report said Adia’s investments in real estate accounts for 7.5 per cent of the total assets under management of the world’s third largest SWF.
Adia manages $828 billion in assets, making it the world’s third- largest sovereign wealth fund after Norway’s Government Pension Fund ($1.03 trillion) and China Investment Corporation ($900 billion), according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute Citing data from IPE Real Assets, the report ranks ABP Netherlands ($48.154 billion); Allianz Germany ($41.805 billion), AXA France ($40.128 billion) and Qatar Investment Authority ($35 billion) among the top global five real estate investors after Adia.
“Institutional investors have been increasing their portfolio allocation to alternative investments including real estate,” Indosuez report said. Real estate assets have helped provide a steady and diversified income stream to institutional portfolios as well as providing yield in the context of a low interest rate environment, the report said.
Some of Adia’s real estate projects include the $2 billion-plus high-end residential Waterline Square development on New York’s Hudson River, the €200 million deal with developer Bouygues Batiment lle-de-France for constructing a 38-storey office tower in Paris and the Mall of Switzerland opened last November.
IPE Real Assets have recently listed the 100 largest institutional real estate investors in the world by rank.
“Not only have large institutional real estate investors become more ‘global’ in origin, they are investing more ‘globally’, as can been seen by the amount of cross-border investment in the chart below,” said Victoria Scalogne, Senior Real Estate Analyst at Indosuez. She said institutional investors have also been increasing their portfolio allocation to alternative investments including real estate. “Real estate assets have helped provide a steady and diversified income stream to institutional portfolios as well as providing yield in the context of a low interest rate environment.”
The report also highlights the arrival of new players mainly from the Middle East, Singapore, South Korea and China among the top twenty. SWFs from the Middle East have helped diversify their economies away from oil and invest in a wide range of non-oil related assets, said Scalogne. According to IPE Real Estate, the top investors continue to prefer European markets followed by North America. In spite of the search for yield, market transparency and stability remains a key factor as well as low barriers to entry for real estate investors, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.
“As global wealth rises, the size of the institutional real estate investment world will become larger and with this will come more institutional grade buildings being built around the world, even in markets outside current established ‘gateway cities’,” said the Indosuez report. — issacjohn@khaleejtimes.com