Mathieu Elshout has been appointed to lead the European property strategy and team at Aware Super, Australia’s third largest superannuation fund. As senior investment director, he will start on July 1 and joins from Germany-based real assets manager Patrizia, where he has served as senior managing director and head of sustainability and impact investing since March 2021.
Under Elshout’s leadership, Patrizia launched its debut impact fund reporting under Article 9 of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. Patrizia Sustainable Communities I closed in January this year with €300 million to invest in social and affordable housing, as previously reported by PERE.
Prior to Patrizia, Elshout spent more than 12 years at PGGM Investments, which manages the assets of Dutch pension fund Pensioenfonds Zorg en Welzijn, where he was senior director for real estate EMEA and was also responsible for sustainability across the investor’s real estate portfolio.
Elshout will be based in Aware Super’s London office, which opened in November last year. He will report to both Damien Webb, the pension’s head of international and deputy chief investment officer, in London, and Alek Misev, global head of property, in Sydney.
Elshout’s hire completes the build-out of Aware Super’s initial 15-person private markets investment team in London, according to a statement from Webb: “Over time we’ll grow the London team further still, with a plan for 30 investment professionals in the coming years. For now though, the team is match fit and bursting with talent – the ideal foundation for our international expansion and we are making strong progress on completing investments towards our goals.”
The office in London represents Aware Super’s first international presence, through which it plans to invest A$10 billion ($6.6 billion; €6.1 billion) into real estate, infrastructure and private equity in the UK and Europe, A$3.5 billion of which it aims to have deployed by June 2025. Real estate represents the largest portion of the investor’s target deployment for its European expansion strategy, for which it seeks to acquire real estate operating platforms across the UK and Western Europe – either directly, or semi-directly in partnership with other institutional investors – and grow them organically or through mergers and acquisitions.
During a fireside chat at the PERE Network Europe Forum in mid-April, Webb said the firm had yet to spend any new money on property investments through the London office. “We have not yet gotten to the point where we want to make an investment in real estate,” he told members, referencing the greater headwinds facing real estate relative to infrastructure and private equity at present. “I do think pricing still has a bit of a way to go,” he explained.
Globally, Aware Super has a current allocation of 8 percent to real estate, and plans to grow this over the next few years. Of the approximately A$12 billion it has invested in real estate, 20 percent is invested in Europe and 10 percent in the US – the remainder is in Australia. Looking forward, however, the pension fund has ambitions to grow its overseas exposure to up to 60 percent of its real estate portfolio. The investor has A$175 billion under management, which is projected to grow to around A$250 billion in the next few years.
Following Elshout’s departure, Patrizia announced this week it had restructured its ESG team, promoting Edward Pugh to head of sustainability and assigning Mads Rude, head of the firm’s multimanager business Patrizia Global Partners, with responsibility for impact investing.
