CapitaLand to bolster presence outside of Asia

Singapore-headquartered real estate investment firm CapitaLand Investment will further grow its product offerings and investor coverage globally with three key hires made over the past three months, PERE has learned.

The firm has made one hire in Europe and two in the US, respectively. Based in London, Gagan Grewal has been named as the managing director of global product development. The real estate veteran joined the firm in May with close to 24 years of industry experience, according to her LinkedIn profile. Prior to this, Grewal had held senior roles at real estate investment firms including serving as head of business development in Europe for Europa Capital and MGPA. The latter firm was acquired by BlackRock in 2013.

In the US, the firm has appointed Theodore Koros and William Daly as managing directors of US capital raising and business development. Prior to joining CLI in March, Koros had spent over 26 years at BlackRock, where he was most recently a managing director leading fundraising activities for the firm’s real assets platform, according to his LinkedIn profile. Apart from developing and maintaining client relationships, Koros also focused on creating new products and implementing product strategy when he was at BlackRock.

Daly joined CLI in April and he was most recently a consultant focusing on capital raising for Fiera Capital’s real estate offerings and managing the firm’s US investor relationships, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to that, Daly also worked at BlackRock where he focused on capital raising and product strategy for the firm’s real estate investment products. During his tenure at BlackRock, he participated in the rebrand, restructure and relaunch of the firm’s open-ended core real estate fund.

In their new roles, both Koros and Daly will focus on capital raising in the US and curating product strategy for CapitaLand’s global real estate and alternative investment products.

The Singaporean firm has been actively growing its private fund products after demerging from the development business of CapitaLand Limited in September 2021.

“While extending our dominance in the listed funds sector, we aim to grow, diversify and distribute new private fund products. Both the listed funds and the private equity business will augment CLI’s AUM and FUM growth globally,” Lee Chee Koon, CLI Group chief executive officer said in a release at the time.

One of those new private fund products was CapitaLand Open End Real Estate Fund, the flagship regional core-plus fund that CLI launched last year. The fund has completed four investments in Asia-Pacific, with total investment amounting to approximately $900 million to date, according to a release.

The firm appointed Simon Treacy and Patrick Boocock last year to lead the firm’s private equity real estate and private equity alternative assets businesses, respectively. Treacy was formerly the managing director, global chief investment officer and head of US equity for BlackRock Real Estate while Boocock was previously managing partner and head of Asia at Brookfield Asset Management.