For nearly a decade, Nareit and EPRA’s Investor Outreach teams have been collaborating on an annual series of joint investor outreach meetings with major U.K. and European investment organizations. In light of the global social distancing measures in place to help contain COVID-19, the 2020 edition of the joint outreach has been conducted virtually with organizations based in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. This collaborative outreach provides an important opportunity for Nareit and EPRA to leverage the research and industry perspectives of both organizations to deliver a unified and coherent global perspective on the real estate investment proposition through listed REITs and real estate equities worldwide.
During the past two weeks, meetings were conducted with executive decision makers at 13 organizations, including pension funds, investment consultants, investment managers, and insurance companies, with total aggregated assets under management and advisement of approximately $3.5 trillion. The following prominent organizations were among those Nareit and EPRA held briefings with in this year’s lineup:
- Germany : Bayerische Versorgungskammer (BVK), its largest pension system;
- United Kingdom : The Transport for London (TfL) and the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) pension systems, as well as the global investment consulting firm Willis Towers Watson; and
- Switzerland : Zurich Insurance and Credit Suisse Asset Management.
Key topics and themes of interest during the meetings included:
- A global perspective on the economy and discussion around potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on real estate demand and use across property sectors;
- How REITs provide investors with the opportunity to achieve broad portfolio diversification by property type, including access to new economy sectors; and
- Citing findings from recent research by CEM Benchmarking, demonstrating how REITs have proven to be strong long-term contributors to mixed asset pension investment portfolios, providing strong relative performance while delivering the diversification benefits of real estate investment cost effectively.
(Contact: Meredith Despins at mdespins@nareit.com)