Why Manova Partners Wants To Be The David To The Goliaths Of Asset Management

After getting hooked on low interest rates, the titans of the investment management world have become addicted to growth. But as the outlook on rates and generating returns has shifted, a newly independent real estate fund manager is going the other way.

Manova Partners spun off from Macquarie Group in December when co-CEOs Christian Goebel and Florian Winkle took with them €12B — roughly $13.5B — in assets under management and approximately 150 employees, all of whom are now partners in the new company. 

In doing so, Manova left behind the backing of an Australian financial titan with over $609B in AUM. But that’s the point, Goebel told Bisnow in the Manhattan office that Manova recently moved into as he sat next to Alin Sigheartau, the firm’s head of transactions and business development in the U.S.

“You have this big consolidation of the market, driven by several market factors, such as increasing cost, regulation and so on and so forth. But it's resulting in everybody going for the same thing, which is scale,” Goebel said. “In the not-so-zero interest rate environment, you have to be much more bespoke. You have to be much more customized in your solutions.”

For fund managers, growing AUM has become a blood sport. In 2023, Blackstone became the first private equity behemoth to reach $1T in assets. It has surpassed that since, with nearly $1.2T by the end of March, up 10% year-over-year.

Blackstone’s achievement subsequently raised the bar for its competitors. Apollo has been on a rampage, targeting $1.5T in AUM by 2029. It hit $785B in AUM in the first quarter of 2025, a 17% jump in one year. KKR’s AUM similarly surged 15% to $638B, while Carlyle reported $453B, a 6% increase.

Managers with 12-figure portfolios don’t serve every investor, Goebel said. While acknowledging that AUM growth is important, he said that the firm is more focused on continuously expanding, not reaching a specific figure. 

“There’s a tremendous amount of investors who want to really understand what's happening with their real estate portfolio,” Goebel said. “As opposed to being invited once a year to some big general shareholder meeting where they're being flown to New York, they have a gala dinner and they're being told that they're the best investors in the world.” 

“Then they don't hear from their asset managers for the rest of the year.”

Under Manova’s structure, localized investment and management teams are spread across the markets they cover. The firm is active in 23 countries and has 18 offices, which allows Manova to better control the quality of its service along with the necessary accounting and reporting, the executives said.

That’s particularly important as some investors continue to feel the fallout from the pandemic. 

“You cannot sit in your ivory tower on Avenue of the Americas, or Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue,” Goebel said. “A lot of investors have lost a lot of money in real estate over the last couple of years … You have to provide solutions to investors today which deal with their existing portfolios as well as growth, and we feel that we can do that much better.”

Of course, when managing billions of dollars on behalf of institutions, there are certain things you can’t get away from. For one, Goebel and Sigheartau spoke to Bisnow on the penthouse floor of 589 Fifth Ave., about a block away from JPMorgan Chase’s new supertall headquarters.

And like many of its peers, Manova had to deal with a heavily office-oriented portfolio when the pandemic hit. In 2018, when it was still a division of Macquarie, 80% of Manova's assets were office buildings. Today, that stands at about half, following diversification into other sectors — especially logistics.

Manova oversees approximately $4B of properties in the U.S. That includes real estate in major hubs like 140 W. 42nd St. in Times Square and 375 W. Broadway in SoHo. However, the company’s main focus is on secondary markets such as Denver, Phoenix, Nashville and Pittsburgh.

Its average investment is between $50M and $100M, and the vast majority of acquisitions are done on an asset-by-asset basis instead of full portfolio purchases.

Upon its independent launch, the company said it had approximately €1B in committed equity capital for expanding its real estate portfolio.

Despite diversifying, Manova didn't fund its growth with dirt-cheap debt, Sigheartau said. Instead, it stayed fairly conservative — Goebel placed Manova’s leverage ratio at 30%. For comparison, the $53B Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust’s is 49%.

And now, despite macroeconomic uncertainty that has frozen deals across the country, Sigheartau believes it’s time to go all in, including in less popular areas and sectors. The firm is currently in negotiations to buy an office building in California.

“If you're investing when everybody thinks that it's the perfect time to invest, not only are you paying a high price, but that is reflective of the absolute highest, most optimistic growth expectations that are baked into it,” Sigheartau said. “We've been very aggressive in pursuing transactions here, [compared to the] more humble, more downside-focused approach that we've taken throughout the history of the business, but I think we're tremendously optimistic over the long run.”