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Oregon’s Governor Speaks On Future of Pension Reforms

The Oregonian is running an interesting column in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election for state governor. The column is called “Tough Questions”, and it gives readers a chance to ask questions to the two candidates, incumbent Gov. Kitzhaber and his challenger, Republican Rep. Dennis Richardson.

Today, a reader asked the governor a question related to the pension reforms enacted by the state last year.

Here’s the exchange, from the Oregonian:

Reader: The court decision on the 2013 PERS changes is expected by the 2015 Legislature. You’ve said that you’re done with PERS reforms. Does that mean that if the Court strikes down all or some of the PERS changes, you will not revisit the changes that were rejected previously? If so, then what budget items do you plan on cutting to make up for the extra PERS costs.

Gov. Kitzhaber: The 2013 PERS reform, along with pension fund earnings, reduced the system’s unfunded liability from $16.3 billion at the end of 2011 to $8.1 billion at the end of 2013. As a result of these changes we are already succeeding in controlling costs and today public employers are investing more in programs and services and school districts have begun hiring back teachers, reducing class size and restoring a full school year.

The reforms adopted are fair, progressive and legally defensible. We believe the State will prevail in court. With PERS off the table, we need to harness the same bipartisan support to make targeted investments in third grade reading, science and technology education and other key programs.

In a poll on the Oregonian website, 72 percent of readers said they though Kitzhaber dodged the question with his answer. But 28 percent of readers thought he answered the question fully.

Director Stole $739,000 From Small Massachusetts Pension Fund

The pension fund run by Maynard, a small town 20 miles outside of Boston, isn’t very big. It has $29 million in assets and serves about 270 total members.

But the fund is making headlines today for an unfortunate reason: it’s been revealed that the fund’s director, Timothy McDaid, had stolen $739,000 from the fund since 2007.

What’s more, his scheme would have continued if it weren’t for an anonymous tipster who informed the fund of the theft. From the Boston Globe:

McDaid, who oversaw Maynard’s $29 million retirement fund, was attending a 2012 conference of public pension officials. Such events are usually predictable affairs, but this one took a dramatic turn.

Three colleagues from the Maynard pension board pulled McDaid into a meeting room to confront him with troubling information. Through an anonymous fax, they had just learned that McDaid had a drug problem and that six months earlier he was convicted of stealing $165,000 from a charity where he had kept the books.

“Did you hurt us too, Tim?” one of them asked.

His long-running ruse exposed, McDaid broke down in tears, according to board members. He admitted writing himself $739,000 in checks from the town’s pension fund. The news was shocking. But it shouldn’t have been.

[…]

McDaid, now 48, joined Maynard’s retirement system in July 2007 with an impressive resume. He had been chief auditor for the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission, known as PERAC, the group that regulates Massachusetts city and town pension systems. But Maynard’s pension directors did not realize that McDaid had been asked to resign from his $80,000-a-year job there. And they did not call to check his references.

For months, McDaid cut checks to himself from a small office in Maynard’s Town Hall, where he was paid to administer a fund with 98 retirees and 186 active workers. Heavy turnover in the town’s financial staff meant there was no second set of eyes on the books, according to court records and interviews. McDaid told officials he was happy to help out by writing the checks and reconciling the bank records.

McDaid had pilfered $739,000 from the pension fund. And he might have continued to drain money from the system if it hadn’t been for the mysterious fax that arrived in PERAC’s office the Friday before the Hyannis conference.

It was a copy of the court case from the Asperger’s foundation theft. There was no cover sheet, no traceable fax number.

There’s much more to the story, including how auditors failed to uncover McDaid’s prior conviction of stealing from a charity organization. You can read the full story here.

Report: Maryland Fund’s Below-Median Returns Coincide With Shift to Alternatives

The Maryland State Retirement and Pension System experienced a 14 percent return in the 2013-14 fiscal year. The fund’s then-Chief Investment Officer, Melissa Moye, touted the returns as “strong” – but a new report suggests not only that those returns were below-median level, but also that they were driven by a shift in investment strategy that put more money in alternative investments.

From David Sirota at the International Business Times:

According to [report authors] Walters and Hooke, a former Lehman Brothers executive, that shift [of assets to Wall Street] coincided with below-median returns for Maryland’s public pension system.

“Ironically, as the fund’s relative performance has declined, its Wall Street money management fees have risen,” the report says. “In fiscal year 2014 alone, the Maryland state pension fund paid out roughly $300 million in fees to Wall Street money managers. Over the past 10 years, these money management fees amounted to over $1.5 billion, according to the fund’s annual financial reports. Nevertheless this high-priced advice resulted in 10-year returns that were $3.22 billion (net of fees) below the median.”

If the fund had matched medianreturns for public pension systems across the country, “the state could have awarded 80,000 poor children with $40,000 four-year college scholarships,” Hooke and Walters wrote.

Maryland’s shift into alternative investments happened while the securities and investment industries made more than $292,000 worth of campaign contributions to Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, who appoints some members of the Maryland pension system’s board of trustees. Vice News has reported that the Private Equity Growth Capital Group is a financial backer of a 501(c)4 group co-founded by O’Malley. In May, Pensions and Investments magazine reported that the Maryland governor appointed a managing director of an alternative investment firm called The Rock Creek Group to head a state task force on retirement policy.

Meanwhile, the chief investment officer of Maryland’s pension system was recently appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Treasury Department overseeing public pension policy.

“Eliminating active managers, selling alternative investments, and adopting indexing for 90 percent of the state’s portfolio would ensure median performance,” his report concludes. “These actions would also save the state huge amounts in money management fees.”

Hooke has testified in front of lawmakers advocating the increased use of index funds in pension investments – a strategy that would have worked well the last 4 or 5 years, but one that offers little protection against market contractions.

Since 2008, Maryland has more than doubled its investments in private equity, real estate and hedge funds. Those asset classes made up 29 percent of its portfolio in 2013.

Fitch Downgrades Pennsylvania; “Weakened” Pension System Drives Demotion

Credit rating agency Fitch has downgraded Pennsylvania’s general obligation bonds one notch, from AA to AA-.

What’s more, Fitch changed the state’s outlook from “stable” to “negative” – meaning another downgrade could be coming if Pennsylvania doesn’t address the structural problems that led to this recent demotion.

The structural problems in question are largely linked with the state’s pension system. From the Fitch report:

CONTINUED FISCAL IMBALANCE DRIVES DOWNGRADE: The downgrade to ‘AA-‘ reflects the commonwealth’s continued inability to address its fiscal challenges with structural and recurring measures. After an unexpected revenue shortfall in fiscal 2014, the current year budget includes a substantial amount of one-time revenue and expense items to achieve balance and continues the deferral of statutory requirements to replenish reserves which were utilized during the recession. The commonwealth’s rapid growth in fixed costs, particularly the escalating pension burden, poses a key ongoing challenge, although Fitch expects budgetary planning and management to mitigate these pressures in a manner consistent with the ‘AA-‘ rating.

PENSION FUNDING DEMANDS: The funding levels of the commonwealth’s pension systems have materially weakened as a result of annual contribution levels that have been well below actuarially determined annual required contribution (ARC) levels. Under current law, contributions are projected to reach the ARC for the two primary pension systems by as soon as fiscal 2017, but the budgetary burden will increase, crowding out other funding priorities.

INCREASING BUT STILL MODERATE LONG-TERM LIABILITIES: The commonwealth’s debt ratios are in line with the median for U.S. states. However, the commonwealth’s combined debt plus Fitch-adjusted pension liabilities is above-average, and will likely continue growing given the current statutory schedule of pension underfunding for at least the next few years. Fitch views Pennsylvania’s long-term liability burden as manageable at the ‘AA-‘ rating so long as the commonwealth adheres to its funding schedule, or enacts reforms that do not materially increase liability or annual funding pressure.

[…]

Without structural expense reform, or broad revenue increases, pension costs will consume a larger share of state resources and limit the commonwealth’s overall fiscal flexibility. In fiscal 2015, commonwealth contributions will increase over $600 million from the prior year to $2.7 billion on a $30 billion general fund budget (9.1%). Based on the statutory framework and the pension systems’ historical data and actuarial projections for contributions, Fitch anticipates increases for fiscal 2016 and 2017 will be similar though somewhat lower. While substantial, Fitch views the anticipated increases in annual contributions and unfunded liabilities laid out in the current statutory framework as within the commonwealth’s capacity to absorb at the ‘AA-‘ rating level.

Moody’s downgraded Pennsylvania in July.

Video: Challenges Facing Public Pensions

The 2014 CSG National Conference was held last month, but videos of the presentations have just begun to surface in the past few weeks.

This presentation touches on the history of public pension plans in the United States, the challenges those plans face today, and the retirement “insecurity” faced by private sector workers.

The talk, titled “Public Pensions”, was given by Hank Kim, executive director and counsel for the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems. His bio:

Hank Kim is executive director and counsel for the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, the largest public pension trade association in the United States. His responsibilities include strategic planning for NCPERS, promoting retirement security for all workers through access to defined benefit pension plans, and the expansion of NCPERS’ role in the continuing debate on health care.

Pension Scandals Put Christie In Deep Hole

Over at Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith has written a great post recapping the recent pay-to-play allegations surrounding Chris Christie and Robert Grady and untangling the web of relationships at the heart of the scandal. The post, in full, is below.

________________

By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Memo to Chris Christie: when you are in a hole, quit digging.

If you have any appetite for political slugfests, an unusual one is playing out in New Jersey. Former Pando, now International Business Times reporter David Sirota has been digging into dubious connections between officials in various states who have influence over pension fund investments and their well-heeled Wall Street connections and patrons.

To give a very short summary of Sirota’s biggest current story, the IBT journalist has uncovered questionable connections with two prominent figures, Charlie Baker, who is a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, and former New Jersey pension fund chief Robert Grady.

First, a short background on the Baker story: Sirota showed how that Baker made a $10,000 donation to the New Jersey Republican Party shortly before Christie officials gave Baker’s firm a pension management contract. That donation ran afoul of the Garden State’s pay-to-play rules that bar contributions from executives and partners of entities that manage state pension funds.

New Jersey launched an investigation into Sirota’s charges and announced that as a result, it was exiting the contract with Baker’s firm.

In a sign that Sirota is drawing blood, Christie himself, as well as members of his administration, have launched personal attacks on Sirota rather than making honest rebuttals to his charges (another strategy has been to misrepresent the stringent requirements of the state pay-to-play law). The paper of record in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe, has yet to deign to report on this scandal.

Sirota has also been probing the relationships among state pension fund investments and the holdings of long-standing Christie friend and pension fund overseer Robert Grady. The Christie administration has denied, forcefully, that Grady had any financial interest in firms that benefitted from New Jersey pension fund investments on his watch. That word “interest” is critical, because that’s the term of art in the New Jersey pay-to-play law. And in reading the discussion that follows, bearing in mind that New Jersey rules bar state officials from “being involved” in “any official manner” in which they have direct or indirect personal or financial interest.*

From the article:

Grady was pursuing a new strategy, shifting money into hedge funds and private equity holdings in the name of diversification and higher returns. He was now pushing to entrust up to $1.8 billion of New Jersey pension money to the Blackstone Group, one of the largest players in private equity.

But one special feature of that Blackstone bet underscores the interlocking relationships at play as states increasingly rely on the counsel and management of Wall Street institutions to invest their pension dollars: One of the private equity funds New Jersey was investing in – a pool of money called Blackstone Capital Partners VI – claimed among its investors a Wyoming-based company named Cheyenne Capital. That company’s list of partners included one Robert Grady.

In short, Grady was pushing to invest New Jersey public money in the same Blackstone fund in which his own firm was investing — without disclosing that fact to N.J. officials.

There are two legs to Sirota’s charges. One is that Grady’s firm looks to have gotten preferential treatment from Blackstone. Documents from an SEC investigation state that Cheyenne made a total investment in the Blackstone fund of $2.69 million. That is well below its minimum investment requirement of $20 million.

Due to the opacity of these investments, it is impossible to ascertain whether Cheyenne might have gotten other concessions, such as reduced fees in the fund itself, by lowering the management fees or the performance fees paid by investors in the fund.

Another way that private equity funds reward preferred parties is by giving them co-investment rights, which allows them to invest in the portfolio companies directly and bypass fees at the fund level. We explained how that works last year:

Let’s look at a particularly egregious conflict involving the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray. Ropes is Boston’s ultimate Brahmin firm, with a pedigree dating back to 1865. Past partners including Henry Cabot Lodge and Archibald Cox.

Industry insiders report that Ropes does the legal work for Harvard’s investments in private equity funds… Ropes & Gray also represents two of Boston’s leading PE firms: Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners

The March 6, 1998 Federal Register contained an application to the SEC by Ropes & Gray to form an in-house 1940 Act “investment company” that would be owned by the employees of the firm in order to invest their capital. Critically, as part of its investment company application, Ropes sought and was granted by the SEC an exemption from the normally comprehensive and ongoing public reporting requirements to the SEC that investment companies normally provide.

How has RGIP been investing the Ropes partners’ money? Thanks to the SEC waiver, it’s impossible to know everything. But RGIP appears regularly as an investor in Bain and Thomas H. Lee (another top Boston-based PE fund) deals.

Pay attention, because the distinction I’m about to make is critical to understanding how stinky this is. I am not talking about RGIP being an investor in Bain and Thomas H. Lee funds. To the extent that were the case, RGIP’s interests would be aligned with Harvard as a fellow fund investor, since they’d be in all the same deals, be subject to the same gains and losses, and presumably pay the same or similar fees.

Instead, Ropes & Gray, Harvard’s counsel, is investing alongside Bain and Thomas H. Lee funds in which Harvard is an investor. From an economic perspective, Ropes & Gray is investing ahead of Harvard, because it is not paying the fees a limited partnership investor pays. Moreover, it may well be in an even more advantaged position by virtue by getting access to only the best deals (as in cherrypicking within the funds**) and could potentially better rights on other fronts than its client.

Let me stress: we have no evidence that Cheyenne got this sort of sweetheart deal. But we also can’t be certain that it didn’t. The cult of secrecy around private equity investments means the public, including New Jersey taxpayers, has no idea of knowing, beyond the concession on the minimum investment, whether Grady’s firm got other sweeteners as a result of the New Jersey investment in the same fund. And that is precisely why the New Jersey statues are so draconian on the issue of possible personal and financial conflicts of interest.

Grady provided strenuous denials that he has an “interest”; those statements don’t pass the smell test. As private equity industry expert Eileen Appelbaum remarked:

“Whether or not he has a direct piece of the action from this particular investment, he is a partner in the company that is going to benefit from the investment,” said Eileen Appelbaum, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book “Private Equity at Work.” “If the investment in Blackstone turns out to be profitable, his company is going to benefit from that.”

And don’t kid yourself that Grady was too remote to have had anything to do with the pension fund investment in Blackstone VI:

State Investment Council records show that Grady himself made the formal motion to approve the Blackstone deal, and then voted for it along with most members of the council. Former State Investment Council member Jim Marketti told International Business Times he had no recollection of Grady disclosing his firm’s investment in Blackstone at the time Grady had the council vote on the Blackstone investments.

Another questionable relationship involves the same Blackstone fund’s salvage of Knight Capital. Grady was on the board of Stifel, which was a significant customer of Knight and also joined in the rescue.

The details:

In August 2012, Blackstone Capital Partners VI used money from its investors to finance a deal involving Knight Capital Group, according to SEC documents. Knight had notably suffered losses in the wake of news that a computer glitch in its electronic trading system had sent share prices plummeting on the New York Stock Exchange. The infusion of Blackstone money stopped the bleeding. Blackstone had been joined in its rescue of Knight by another firm, Stifel Financial, which later acquired a piece of Knight’s trading and sales operations. Among the members of Stifel’s board was Grady, according to corporate documents.

According to SEC documents, Grady also owns more than 10,000 shares of the company’s stock, and N.J. financial disclosure forms show Grady is compensated for his position at Stifel.

In short, Blackstone Capital Partners VI applied its investors’ money — including funds from the New Jersey pension system — to co-invest with Stifel, whose board included among its ranks the overseer of New Jersey’s pension investments.

Does this look arm’s length to you? Factor this into your assessment:

[Christopher] Santarelli, the New Jersey Treasury department spokesman, said Grady’s State Investment Council would have no knowledge or influence over how Blackstone opted to invest the money in its fund. Yet a New Jersey investment official previously declared that state officials often influence the financial decisions of the private equity funds in which the state invests.

“We’re a large player,” said then-Division of Investment executive director Timothy Walsh, in a May 2011 interview with the Bergen Record. “We have impact.” He told the newspaper that state pension officials sit on advisory boards for most of the private equity firms with which New Jersey invests, adding that New Jersey’s pension system is better able to influence private equity firms’ decisions than those of companies whose stock it owns.

The New Jersey state pension system listed 600,000 shares of Stifel in its portfolio in 2013, according to the New Jersey Department of Treasury’s annual report. Stifel executives made $15,000 worth of contributions to the New Jersey Republican Party in 2011, according to campaign finance disclosures.

Assemblyman John Wisniewski, who heads the state’s Select Committee on Investigation, is pushing for an official probe into l’affaire Grady.

Even though it seems unlikely in the cesspool of New Jersey politics, it is still entirely possible that Robert Grady’s conduct regarding his dealings with Blackstone, both with the fund investment and the Knight rescue, were on the up and up. But even so, he clearly looks to have violated the state’s stringent laws about conflicts of interest.

And this case serves as yet another object lesson in how private equity’s draconian secrecy policies can foster corruption. Even if it didn’t actually occur here, it would be easy for it to have taken place.

___
*Clearly, this restriction would not apply to cases where a pension fund executive held a public stock and a New Jersey pension fund bought shares in the same stock. The impact of the New Jersey buy, if any, would be too small and short term for the state official to derive any benefit.

Study: Retirement Savings Have Grown Across All Age Groups Since 2007

Data shows that nest eggs, on the whole, are smaller these days. But a recent survey suggests a bit of good news: since the financial crisis, median retirement savings across age groups have grown by leaps and bounds.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Despite all the attention paid to insufficient total savings, median retirement savings among working-age households have grown considerably over the past five years, according to the 15th Annual Retirement Survey from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies. The survey tracked median retirement nest eggs among employed American baby boomers, Generation Xers, and Millennials between 2007 and 2014. For each age group, median savings either doubled or tripled within that seven-year span.

“We’ve seen a healthy increase in savings for employed people,” says Catherine Collinson, president of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies based in Los Angeles, in a phone interview. The recession, she notes, “set off the alarm bells in a way that they weren’t ringing before and took [saving money] to a new level of urgency, and that’s a good thing. If we look at the national dialogue, it’s difficult to turn on the Internet, TV, or radio without hearing some form of conversation about the need for people to plan and save and think about their loved ones.”

Millennials, perhaps predictably, reported the most robust savings growth of the three groups, more than tripling their savings from $9,000 in 2007 to $32,000 in 2014. Xers, the first of whom will start turning 50 next year, doubled their nest eggs, from $32,000 to $70,000. For boomers, median savings increased from $75,000 to $127,000.

There are a host of reasons for the savings increase. Perhaps the biggest is that in a world where defined-contribution plans are overtaking defined benefit plans, the bullish stock market has been a boon for 401(k)s.

Photo by 401kcalculator.org

Craig Douglas: Massachusetts Candidates Need To Take Page Out of Gina Raimondo’s Book

Rhode Island’s pension system, and the race for governor surrounding it, has been grabbing all the headlines of late. But it’s neighbor, Massachusetts, is probably just as deserving of the press.

Data from the Center for Retirement Research suggests that Massachusetts’ various retirement systems are among the most underfunded in the country. And, like Rhode Island, the state will soon vote for its new governor.

Craig Douglas, the managing editor of the Boston Business Journal, says Massachusetts’ candidates for governor would do well to take a page out of Gina Raimondo’s book. From his editorial in the Providence Journal:

It’s high time Massachusetts had a governor who actually acknowledged the state pension system for what it is: a ticking time bomb.

[…]

Whereas Raimondo fought to overhaul Rhode Island’s worst-offending pension plans, Massachusetts has been a serial can-kicker. In 2011, Gov. Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Robert DeLeo were quick to dole out the back slaps after amending the state pension system’s funding schedule and benefits for newly hired employees. The moves, they said, would lower the state’s annual pension payments by a cumulative $5 billion through 2040.

What they didn’t mention is that, by extending the system’s payoff period by 10 years, they were baking in an additional $26.4 billion in costs for the state, according to an analysis by The Pioneer Institute. Welcome to the Bluto Blutarsky School of Pension Math.

I asked Baker and Coakley to reflect on Raimondo’s approach and whether it jives with their own pension policies. Their responses? Egh.

The Coakley camp “applauds” Patrick’s efforts to address the state’s retiree obligations, and used all sorts of buzz words and nuance to make clear that she is no Gina the Reformer. When politicians couch pension reform with terms such as “we need to take a serious look” and “additional reforms for new workers,” you can bet they are peddling yesterday’s meatloaf as today’s sloppy Joe.

As for Baker, well, his response was at once promising and disappointing. While he hit all the right talking points — better funding ratios, smarter investment strategies, an end to kicking “the can down the road” — Baker’s blueprint to tackle those problems is both vague and short on specifics. He even suggested more local aid could help address the equally frightening pension crisis affecting Massachusetts towns and cities. Come on Charlie, you’re better than that.

Or maybe not. If candidates are unwilling to take a tough stance on the fiscal straits facing Massachusetts today, when will they?

Massachusetts’ pension systems were 61 percent funded in 2013, collectively.

CalSTRS, Others Bankroll Study on Economic Impact of Climate Change

To date, there have been zero state-level pension funds that have heeded public calls to divest from fossil fuel-dependent companies.

But that doesn’t mean some pension funds aren’t interested in learning the impact climate change could have on their investments in the future.

Several of the world’s largest pension funds, including CalSTRS, have joined with Mercer to conduct a study forecasting the impact of climate change on markets over the next 40 years. From Chief Investment Officer:

The study aims to map out potential climate scenarios and their impacts on economies and markets, with forecasts stretching out to 2030 and 2050.

It follows a weekend of marches across the world calling for action on climate change, as the United Nations prepares to meet for a Climate Summit in New York on September 23.

Among the pension funds signed up to the study are the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), New Zealand Super, and Sweden’s AP1. In total, Mercer said asset owners representing $1.5 trillion were backing the survey.

Jane Ambachtsheer, head of Mercer’s global responsible investment team, said the survey’s objective was “to help investors make robust, well–researched investment decisions that factor in a consideration of climate change”.

“New data points and scientific evidence are now available, including the topical subject of the potential risk posed by so-called ‘stranded’ carbon assets,” she added. “Ultimately, it’s about enabling institutional investors to adapt over the longer-term.”

Brian Rice, portfolio manager at CalSTRS, was among those welcoming the launch of the study. “The multi-scenario, forward looking approach to this study makes it unique,” he said. “Investors will be able to consider allocation optimisation, based on the scenario they believe most probable, to help mitigate risk and improve investment returns.”

A few days ago, CalSTRS announced plans to triple its investments in clean energy.

Photo: Paul Falardeau via Flickr CC License

Canada Pension Fund Begins $1.3 Billion Spending Spree on Paris Real Estate

The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) has made its first investment in what’s likely to be a line of many in Paris real estate.

The first purchase: a $337 million office building in central Paris. The pension fund says it plans to invest another $850 million in Paris real estate over the next three years.

Reported by the Financial Times:

Oxford Properties, the real estate arm of giant Ontario fund Omers, has bought a 237,000 sq ft building in Rue Blanche, central Paris, from the Carlyle Group for €263m.

Its move into Paris is the fund’s first step into continental European offices.

Michel Vauclair, an Oxford Properties senior vice-president, said it aimed to build up its Paris portfolio to €1bn in the next three years.

It will focus on “assets where we can drive value through active asset management . . . and where we believe that current values do not reflect future market improvements”, Mr Vauclair said.

Until recently the Paris property market has been sluggish, partly as a result of the country’s economic weakness and political uncertainty. But Mr Vauclair said that Oxford Properties sees “the prospect for significant growth to come through infrastructure improvements and a broader economic recovery”.

OMERS isn’t the only organization buying up Paris property. In fact, many foreign investors are flocking to the city. From the Financial Times:

Janet Stewart-Goatly, a senior capital markets director at property advisers CBRE, said the Paris market had seen a 60 per cent increase in transactions year-on-year as foreign investors flood into the market.

“If you’re looking to build up your international portfolio, you can’t ignore Paris,” she said. “There is a massive weight of capital seeking to invest.”

As a result yields are about 4 per cent for Paris’s central business district and 5.5 per cent in the La Defense business cluster, she added.

La Defense had a 12 per cent vacancy rate last year – partly as a result of a handful of large companies relocating to the Paris suburbs – but vacancies are now falling as more businesses take up space, Ms Stewart-Goatly said.

OMERS says it is targeting Paris due to an improving economy coupled with the likely leveling-off of its high vacancy rate, which the fund says is “temporary”.

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