OK Teachers searching for non-core managers

The Oklahoma Teachers’ Retirement System has issued RFPs for value-added and opportunistic real estate fund managers.

The Oklahoma Teachers’ Retirement System (OTRS) has issued two requests for proposal (RFPs), one for value-added real estate managers and one for opportunistic real estate managers.  In each RFP, the $13.1 billion pension stated it was seeking an “open-end vehicle or other appropriate structure for the investment of assets in this area”.
 
The RFPs are part of the Oklahoma City-based pension’s plan to meet its increased real estate allocation and come two months after PERE revealed how OTRS planned to allocate an additional $283 million to its real estate program in order to make its first commitments to real estate debt and non-core strategies and to meet its new target allocation, which it bumped up from 5 percent to 7 percent in the third quarter of 2013. 
 
For both RFPs, OTRS listed the following minimum requirements: the applicant must be an SEC registered investment advisor or exempt from such registration; the applicant must have at least three major tax-exempt clients; and the applicant must have at least five years’ experience providing the specified services.  The documents also noted that “the experience qualification may be met either at the level of the organization or from assigned personnel who qualify from experience at a prior firm.”
 
When it comes to evaluating the submitted RFPS, OTRS included the same scoring breakdown for both the value-added and opportunistic RFPs, allocating 20 percent to investment process, 20 percent to “appropriate portfolio structure,” 20 percent to fees/compensation structure, 15 percent to ownership structure, 15 percent to personnel and 10 percent to prior fund returns.