Goldman Sachs has appointed a sole head of its real estate investment management arm as well as new heads of Europe and Asia.

Jim Garman is now global head of real estate at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The company's real estate division has staged a comeback after a tough time in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, PERE reported.

Previously Garman was co-head of real estate at the investment bank’s asset management division alongside Takashi Murata, who left to join Warburg Pincus earlier this year.

Richard Spencer will become EMEA head of real estate, PERE reported, and Nikhil Reddy will become Asia-Pacific head of real estate. Head of U.S. real estate Gaurav Singh left earlier this year and has not yet been replaced.

Garman is a 30-year Goldman vet, having joined the company in 1992. As head of Europe, he led deals like the creation of the iQ student accommodation platform alongside the Wellcome Trust, which was bought by Blackstone for £4.7B in March 2020. He will relocate from London to New York.

Spencer is head of Goldman’s series of real estate debt funds, which have raised large pots of capital over the past decade. Bisnow revealed in December that the film is looking to raise a pool of around $7B for its latest such fund, West Street Real Estate Credit Partners IV.

In April last year, Goldman raised $3.5B for West Street Real Estate Investment Partners, the first time it has raised a real estate equity fund since 2007. The previous fund, the $4.2B Whitehall Street Global Real Estate 2007, only returned 75 cents for every dollar of equity investors stumped up.

In financial results for the second quarter of 2023, Goldman said it had written down the value of its real estate holdings by $485M, although this is mainly equity investments and loans made using its own balance sheet rather than the real estate funds it manages.