GreenOak appoints Klebes as Japan head

GreenOak Real Estate has appointed Daniel Klebes to lead its investments in Japan.

Klebes has joined with the title representative director and president of GreenOak Investment Management, the Tokyo-headquartered Japanese arm of the firm. He started his role last month.

Following his hire, Fred Schmidt, a founding member of GreenOak Real Estate who had been leading the firm's operations in Japan, has now become chairman of GreenOak Investment Management, while also maintaining a representative director role.

A seasoned real estate executive, Klebes was previously the chief investment officer for the private equity real estate firm Aetos Capital. He spent six years with the firm, initially living in Tokyo and then splitting his time between Japan and the US, and left the firm in late 2010. Klebes then went on to set up GTO Capital Management, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based real estate development company, while also working as a senior advisor for the US private investment firm TPG.

Before Aetos, Klebes was a managing director with the merchant banking division of Goldman Sachs.

GreenOak Real Estate’s senior leadership expansion in Japan comes months after the firm successfully raised $650 million in equity for its second Japan real estate fund. In March this year, the firm hit the hard cap for GreenOak Asia Fund II that was launched with an original $500 million fundraising target.

The fund corpus is currently being deployed in office buildings with repositioning potential within Tokyo and Osaka. So far around 15 percent of the capital has been deployed in four investments.

GreenOak Real Estate was founded in 2010 by three former heads of Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing – Sonny Kalsi, John Carrafiell, and Fred Schmidt.