Brookfield to launch RE secondaries business – exclusive

Brookfield Asset Management, a giant of the private equity real assets market, has become the latest firm to enter the secondaries investment business.

The Toronto-headquartered firm has hired Partners Group‘s Fabian Neuenschwander and Marcus Day to support senior leaders at Brookfield in the build out of the firm’s real estate secondaries unit, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

A spokeswoman for Brookfield confirmed the appointments.

Secondaries Investor reported on Thursday that Neuenschwander, an almost 13-year veteran of the Swiss firm who was its co-head of real estate for the Americas until the beginning of this year, had departed last week.

Denver-based Day was a senior vice-president, head of acquisitions Americas, real estate secondaries at Partners Group, according to his LinkedIn profile. He joined the firm in 2016.

A spokeswoman for Partners Group confirmed Day’s departure.

Brookfield had been exploring adding secondaries to its platform as recently as last August, sister publication Buyouts reported last year, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. It is unclear whether the firm, which had shown interest in buying a secondaries firm outright, was focusing on private equity or real estate secondaries at that time.

Brookfield is the second-largest manager in private equity real estate, according to sister title PERE‘s list of the top 100 firms by fundraising over the past five years. It has raised $29.01 billion, second only to Blackstone.

The firm has $201 billion in real estate assets under management, according to its website.

Annual deal volume for real estate secondaries rose 20 percent last year to $6 billion year-on-year, according to UBS’s 2020 Secondary Market Survey and Outlook. The market remains less crowded than its private equity cousin. Only seven firms in Secondaries Investor‘s SI 30 ranking of the biggest fundraisers have dedicated pots of capital for the strategy, either via real estate secondaries funds or funds of funds focusing on the asset class.