Alternatives are essential

Hamish MacDonald, Head and CIO of APAC Real Estate, BlackRock

Alastair Nash, CEO, Wentworth Capital

Hamish You can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and, in some cases, called social infrastructure. Real asset investors leaning more and more into infrastructure assets, if we can find real estate that looks like infrastructure from a cash flow perspective, then we think that that’s going to have a deep liquid exit.

Hamish Alastair, we’ve known each other for coming on 15 years now. We’ve worked together for nearly five years.

Hamish And we are very, very proud of the portfolio that we’ve built together with Urban Logistics Co. We had an absolute alignment of, of interests as partners going into that strategy. Onto our new thesis, and this is in life sciences where we have recently done a deal to establish a new operating platform called Area 53. I’m very proud to say with Wentworth Capital and we’ve bought two seed assets in Sydney. Can you tell us a little bit about the thesis? Why life sciences.

Alastair It is a sector that, as you mentioned has played out offshore. And there’s a lot of growth in the Australian context. There is no focused, pure play life science real estate platform, but converse to that, there is a very vibrant and healthy life science sector. there’s a number of universities that have huge requirements for lab space and office space, but not just the universities. It’s corporates, government, venture capital, a whole ecosystem of tenants that that interact with each other So that really began the exploration phase of the strategy. And it felt like a very natural follow on to what we’ve been doing together in logistics.

Hamish Specifically, what types of investment opportunities are you looking at in the life sciences space in Australia?

Alastair The most active at the moment is targeting REITs that need to raise capital to fund development pipelines The second area where we’re getting a lot of traction is with the universities themselves. They all have large life science programs and ambitions around life science, but don’t necessarily have the capital to invest into the infrastructure to provide that.

Hamish As a private equity real estate investor, why do you choose BlackRock to partner with in those circumstances?

Alastair A number of reasons. Speed of execution has been everything. We definitely benefited from the first mover advantage in last mile logistics, and we are now benefiting from the first mover advantage in life science. Having a capital partner that has global perspectives has seen this play out in other markets. Therefore, has high conviction, can mobilize large pools of capital and move quickly, allows us to take advantage of these very compelling opportunities.

Alastair And following on from the trend around global insights, what else are you and the BlackRock platforms seeing globally that could be applicable to the Asian market?

Hamish We definitely see a continued path to finding sectors that have been well established and are successful in these Western markets and bringing them down into Australia or at least finding where those assets are in Australia and then aggregating those. We need to find sectors that have got good growth prospects at the same time. So we’re really looking for sectors that A. Have strong supply and demand prospects; B. Are going to be deeply in demand by large scale global investors at our exit and; C. Are quite new or nascent in their journey in the Australian context. So we look at sectors like childcare centers, for example. We like sectors like self-storage if we can find a way to access it. And so you can see thematically we’re actually leaning into what is often called alternative sectors and in some cases called social infrastructure.

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