AXA Real Estate raises over €1.5 billion for commercial real estate debt fund (EU)

AXA Real Estate Investment Managers SGP, an affiliate of AXA Real Estate Investment Managers, the leading real estate portfolio and asset managers in Europe, announces that it has raised over €1.5 billion at the first closing of its most recent pan-European real estate debt fund Commercial Real Estate Senior 9.
This fund raising, which follows shortly after AXA Real Estate was awarded a separate €250 million commercial real estate investment mandate from a Dutch insurance company, brings the total commitments received by AXA Real Estate for its debt platform in 2014 to €3.7 billion and takes the total platform to around €10 billion.
The Fund is AXA Real Estate’s fourth co-mingled real estate debt fund targeting European third-party institutional investors, and is seeking to raise €2.5 billion in total primarily from insurance companies and pension funds.
This ongoing appetite for investment into loans led AXA Real Estate to innovate a new structure for CRE Senior 9 which allows capital to be recycled back into the Fund once loans have matured, thus allowing investors to retain their investment.
Isabelle Scemama, Head of Fund Groups at AXA Real Estate and CEO of AXA REIM SGP, commented: “At over €1.5 billion, the significant size of this latest tranche of commitments clearly demonstrates how Real Asset Finance has now become an accepted asset class with a specific allocation from most institutional investors. The point is further underlined by both the increased number of investors committing to this fund raise and the growth in the size of their allocations, as well as the fact that there was demand from our clients for a product which allowed capital to be recycled.”
Source: AXA Real Estate