Catella APAM raises £102m for real estate investment
Investment and asset management specialist Catella APAM, a subsidiary of the Catella Group, has launched its inaugural fund as it looks to invest in listed UK property companies.
The fund, Catella APAM Strategic Equities, closed with £102.2m in commitments from institutional investors, and will be focused on identifying mispricing within the UK listed real estate sector.
Founding shareholder of Catella APAM, Simon Cooke, will lead the fund’s investment strategy alongside the firm’s head of investment and research, Ben Kennedy. They will be supported by Catella APAM’s senior asset and development management teams, which have advised on over £4.5bn of assets within the UK and Ireland since its inception.
The fund’s strategy has been designed to target undervalued real estate companies, where underlying asset values have been impacted by recent macroeconomic challenges and shifting demand patterns.
Ben Kennedy, head of investment and research at Catella APAM, said: “The real estate sector has become more operationally intensive and complex, as asset owners begin to acknowledge their role in providing a service to customers rather than just passively holding assets. This is likely to create a more disparate distribution of returns as the gap between winners and losers widens. Our access to actionable, real-time asset data and hands-on expertise gives the fund a predictive edge in assessing companies’ current and future value trajectory. Adopting a value investment approach in UK-listed equities after a period of re-pricing should offer strong risk-adjusted returns to our investors.”
Simon Cooke, founding shareholder of Catella APAM, added: “I believe the listed sector is often undervalued compared to the wider market, as is the strategy, assets, and management teams, particularly following economic downturns. The sector currently trades at a significant discount to NAV, dragged down by recency bias and consolidated by the backward-looking valuation process. This has been a long journey, and I’m proud that we are now launched and mandated to unlock this embedded value.”