Kildare closes second Euro fund on $1.95bn – Exclusive

All the investors which backed the firm's debut vehicle have returned for the sequel, including pensions from California and Texas.

Kildare Partners, the London-based private equity real estate firm, has closed its second Europe-focused property fund after raising $1.95 billion.

Kildare, led by former Lone Star executive Ellis Short, began fundraising for Kildare European Partners II in April last year after announcing it was targeting $2 billion of capital.

The $1.95 billion capital raise has narrowly surpassed the $1.91 billion collected by Kildare for its debut European-focused fund, launched in 2014.

All of the investors in the first fund are understood to have returned to invest in the successor.

The second vehicle, which has a hard cap set at $2.4 billion, will be invested in opportunistic investments across all real estate sectors. However, in a shift from the strategy of its debut fund, this fund will have more of an emphasis on Continental Europe and less on the UK.

Among the investors are US pension funds including the Texas Permanent School Fund, New Mexico Educational Retirement Board, Texas Municipal Retirement System, California State Teachers' Retirement System, Houston Municipal Employees' Pension System and the District of Columbia Retirement Board.

The firm held a first close for Fund II last June last year after attracting around $1.1 billion, according to an SEC filing.

The first fund was invested in real estate and real estate-related non- and sub-performing debt in European markets, including Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. One example of a transaction for the first fund was its acquisition of the Mars Portfolio, a €1 billion loan book containing debt behind 26 office and hotel assets, from investment bank, Deutsche Bank. Fund I's most recent publicly-available returns showed that it generated an 11.8 percent net internal rate of return as of September 30, according to New Mexico ERB meeting materials.