Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management (DeAWM), an investment arm of Frankfurt-based investment bank Deutsche Bank, has poached Koichiro Maeda from Prudential Real Estate Investors to lead the firm’s real estate efforts in Japan, according to a firm statement.
Maeda joins as a managing director and head of real estate, Japan, and will be based out of Tokyo. He was most recently a managing director at Prudential, the property investment arm of US insurer Prudential Financial, where he was focused on business development and major transactions in Japan. Maeda joined Prudential in 2011.
Maeda’s hire comes less than a year after DeAWM saw two of its senior Japan real estate team depart the platform, including Akira Tsuruoka, the head of Japan, and Michio Matsumoto, head of acquisitions in Japan. Matsumoto joined global property services firm CBRE as a director and head of acquisitions for Japan.
Maeda brings 21 years of real estate experience altogether to DeAWM. Before his role at Prudential, he worked at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities’ investment banking unit focusing on real estate, and before that served in developer Mitsui Fudosan in Japan.
“This appointment reflects the strategic importance of our real estate platform in Japan and our continued commitment to the region,” Pierre Cherki, Head of Alternatives and Real Assets for DeAWM, said in the statement. A DeAWM spokeswoman added that the firm sought a candidate to reflect its ambition and reinforced commitment to the Japan market in particular.
Maeda’s hire coincides with DeAWM’s previously announced plans for expansion in the region. “In the direct real estate business in [Asia Pacific], the long-term plan to which we have committed includes a strengthening of activities in mature-like markets in Asia (including Singapore, Japan, Australia and Korea) where our clients are actively seeking exposure,” Nadir Maruf, Deutsche AWM’s head of real assets, Asia Pacific, told PERE previously.
At this point, DeAWM has no real estate-specific head of Asia, as the platform formerly known as RREEF was integrated into the broader alternatives platform. As of last year, the Asian platform is understood to have had about 40 staff – including infrastructure investment professionals – spread between Australia, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
Globally, DeAWM’s alternatives and real assets platform has about $48 billion assets under management in real estate, but Asia has historically been a relatively small part of that. The strategies the firm focuses on include core, value-added, opportunistic, real estate securities and real estate debt.
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