Hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, which has about $33.5B in assets under management, is planning another real estate fund. The target is reportedly $2B.
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That would represent a significant expansion of the hedge fund's real estate play. As of the end of the second quarter of 2018, its real estate assets under management totaled $2.5B, down from $2.6B a year earlier.
The new real estate fund would focus on opportunistic properties, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources.
Most of Och-Ziff's assets under management are in the form of multi-strategy funds ($12.7B) or credit funds ($20.2B). The hedge fund, which was founded by Daniel Och (No. 729 on Forbes' 2018 billionaire list), experienced an outflow of assets in 2016 and 2017 because of a corruption scandal involving bribes to African officials, but has bounced back more recently, with total assets under management up $200M in Q2 2018 compared with a year earlier.
Its real estate funds have done well year over year. Och-Ziff's most recent real estate funds, Och-Ziff Real Estate Funds II and III, produced net internal rates of return of 21.8% and 23.5%, respectively, from their creation to the end of Q2 2018, according to a regulatory filing.
“In the foreseeable future, we think we’re extremely good in credit and in real estate,” Och-Ziff CEO Robert Shafir said during a conference call in early August. “What you will see is extensions that are logical adjacencies to those core businesses.”
Och-Ziff is hardly alone in continuing its bet on real estate. Earlier this month, news broke that investment behemoth Blackstone is planning its next real estate fund, which will total $18B, topping its 2015 fund by more than $2B.
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