Carlyle gets real in Asia

The Carlyle Group has raised $410 million (€337 million) for its first Asia-focused real estate fund, Carlyle Asia Real Estate Partners. When fully leveraged, this will allow the firm to acquire $1.5 billion (€1.23 billion) of office, retail, residential and industrial properties in Japan, China and Korea.
 
A spokesman for the firm told PEO: “We’ve been investing in Asian real estate for a while, but rather than going straight in and doing a fund we decided to do a couple of deals, see how they went, and check what the market was like. We liked what we saw, and decided we had the right team to raise a fund.”
 
The fund will be invested by ten investment professionals in the firm’s Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo offices. In the last year, Carlyle has added another six investment professionals to its Asian real estate team.
 
The firm has already realized two property investments in Seoul, the 20-story office buildings Century Tower and Pacific Tower. Its portfolio also includes the Omiya Center Building, a 14-story office block in a satellite city north of Tokyo, and the Diamond Warehouses storage complex just outside the city.
 
Carlyle now has seven real estate funds globally, with a total value of more than $4 billion.