Catella APAM has raised £102.2m for a new fund that will invest in UK listed property companies.
The Catella APAM Strategic Equities I fund will focus on identifying mispricing within the UK listed real estate sector.
Founding shareholder of Catella APAM, Simon Cooke, and Ben Kennedy, head of investment and research at Catella APAM, will lead the fund’s investment strategy, supported by the company’s senior asset and development management teams.
The fund is the group’s first fundamentals-focused product investing in the listed markets to go live since the launch of Catella Systematic Property Fund in 2022 – a Swedish UCITS fund targeting Nordic-listed property companies through a systematic investment approach.
Kennedy said: “The real estate sector has become more operationally intensive and complex, as asset owners begin to acknowledge their role in providing a service to customers rather than just passively holding assets. This is likely to create a more disparate distribution of returns as the gap between winners and losers widens.
“Our access to actionable, real-time asset data and hands-on expertise gives the fund a predictive edge in assessing companies’ current and future value trajectory. Adopting a value investment approach in UK listed equities after a period of re-pricing should offer strong risk-adjusted returns to our investors.”
Cooke added: “I believe the listed sector is often undervalued compared to the wider market, as is the strategy, assets, and management teams, particularly following economic downturns. The sector currently trades at a significant discount to NAV, dragged down by recency bias and consolidated by the backward-looking valuation process. This has been a long journey, and I’m proud that we are now launched and mandated to unlock this embedded value.”
