There are currently 42 funds in the ASISA South Africa real estate general category. According to Patrick Cairns, in a Citywire article, just 15 of those have assets under management (AUM) of more than R500m and thirteen have less than R50m in assets.
How sustainable it is to have this many funds focused on what is a relatively small sector of the JSE. How many of them are really offering investors a compelling value proposition?
‘We have too many funds that really just do what the benchmark does. Our sector probably needs more differentiation between funds where clients can choose from a wider variety of strategies, from active, to passive, to ones that have more offshore exposure (outside the dual-listed ones), and to ones that are completely benchmark agnostic or have absolute return characteristics via use of derivatives,” Kundayi Munzara, co-manager of the Sesfikile BCI Property fund comments.
Click here to read the Citywire analysis of the sector that throws some interesting light on this question.
Citywire has also identified the 10 top-performing global real estate funds over the past three years available to South African investors. They include solutions from both local and international asset managers.
Scroll through the slides to see which funds made the list.
