PRUPIM expands in Asia with two office openings

PRUPIM, the real estate fund management business of Prudential’s European asset manager M&G Investments, has underlined its ambitions to grow in Asia with the opening of offices in Tokyo and Seoul. The firm has also made four hires.

PRUPIM announced it had appointed Katsuhiro Ishikawa as managing director responsible for leading the firm’s activities in Japan and for building relationships with the country’s institutional investors. He joins from developer Mori Building and has previously worked for Daiwa Securities, UBS and Goldman Sachs.

The firm has also appointed James MacKinnon as head of asset management for Asia. He will be based at PRUPIM’s existing Singapore office and will report to PRUPIM’s Singapore chief executive officer Scott Girard. He joins from AIG Global Real Estate Asia, a platform that has mostly been sold to Invesco Real Estate.

Further to those hires, PRUPIM has also brought aboard Lyndon Lim from Australian developer cum fund manager Lend Lease as an associate director in Singapore responsible for asset management and Sanghyuk Lee as an associate director in the new Seoul office, also responsible for asset management. He joined from property agent Savills.

Alex Jeffrey, PRUPIM’s recently-appointed chief executive said: “Scott Girard has built a strong team in Asia over a number of years. We’re now extending our network of offices, and adding experienced industry professionals with deep local and regional knowledge strengthens our investment proposition. Asia is a core market for PRUPIM and one with excellent potential for us and our clients.”

In April this year PRUPIM took control of Asia’s first open-ended core fund which it launched in 2007 in a joint venture with Chicago-based LaSalle Investment Management. The fund was seeded with $600 million of assets in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea, previously held by Prudential’s UK life funds, and, at the time of its launch, the partners planned to grow the fund to more than $1 billion of assets. However, LaSalle subsequently agreed for PRUPIM to assume sole responsibility for managing the fund with a view to focus its core investing efforts on a country by country basis and not on a pan-regional basis.