The Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is giving $75 million to FCA Partners to invest in retail real estate – specifically, large shopping centers and grocery stores.
From IPE Real Estate:
The new allocation will be invested over the remainder of this year and the beginning of next year.
Capital will be invested in a mixture of grocery-anchored shopping centres and power shopping centres across the US, with a value-add approach.
As a separate-account structure, FCA will have investment discretion within agreed investment guidelines, giving the manager the authority to make final investment decisions without approval from Ohio PERS.
The manager will invest in both debt and equity investments.
Although the relationship between Ohio PERS and FCA Partners is a new one, the manager is a spin-off of Faison & Associates, in which the fund first invested in 1995.
Since inception, the pension fund has invested $932m with the manager.
The death of Henry Faison in 2012 saw the creation of FCA Partners; Ohio PERS has therefore transferred the separate account previously managed by Faison to FCA.
The pension fund is looking to place more capital with separate account managers in value-add retail, industrial and hotel property as part of its $1.26bn allocations to separate-account managers this year.
Ohio PERS manages $88.6 billion in assets, of which 10.3 percent is allocated towards real estate.