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ULI UK appoints Apache Capital’s Ashley Perry as Residential Council Chair
ULI appoints Chair of the ULI UK Residential Council.
RECAP: ULI UK Fund Managers Symposium 2024
1 March 2024
The ULI UK Fund Managers Symposium 2024 explored the challenges and opportunities ahead for capital raising and investment.
Hosted by Dentons, and moderated by John Forbes, partner at John Forbes Consulting, the expert panel included Rob Martin, LGIM Real Assets; Anne Koeman-Sharapova, Mercer; Jenny Buck, Tesco Pension Fund; and Rob Sim, Europa. The panel began by providing some essential background context to the current climate, including:
- We’re at a pivotal moment. With around 50 percent of the world’s electorate going to the polls this year, geopolitical factors will be the biggest challenge facing the industry in the short term;
- We’re seeing a ‘retreat’ from Globalisation. Closely related to geopolitics, investor sentiment is moving away from focusing on globalisation.
The discussion then took a deep dive into several areas relating to capital markets, including:
- The transition from Defined Benefit (DB) to Defined Contribution (DC) pension provision, particularly in the UK;
- The denominator effect and other allocation issues;
- Changes in global capital including perceptions regarding the UK;
- The increasing importance of private wealth channels as a source of investment capital and the growth of mass affluent;
- The attractiveness of real estate as an asset class generally and relative to other “real assets”, particularly infrastructure;
- Where investors want to be on the risk spectrum, including attractions of investing via debt rather than equity.
Additionally, the panel offered further interesting observations on the current climate for investment:
- We need to lose our addiction to cheap capital. It’s time to return to normality on interest rates, which have sustained an unusually low period in recent years;
- We need to act on climate change. This will impact at a global, political, and microeconomic level, and we all need to act, including forcing capital to effect change, but ROI on sustainability projects is not straightforward to predict;
- We need to address ‘zombie’ buildings. Stranded assets may arise from financial and environmental factors, and we need to figure out how to unlock capital on these assets.
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