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OMERS Private Equity’s head of health-care investing to depart
Tim Patterson
Tim Patterson, senior managing director and head of health-care investing at OMERS Private Equity, is leaving at the end of the month.
OMERS Private Equity is the private equity investment arm of the C$109 billion ($85.6 billion) Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, Toronto.
Mr. Patterson has made the personal decision to leave OMERS at the end of January, after having joined the private equity team in 2010, wrote Michael Graham, global head of OMERS Private Equity, in an internal memo obtained by
Pensions & Investments.
Mr. Patterson is also head of the Toronto office for OMERS Private Equity.
SWFs, pension funds remain eager to buy property assets
Falling tourist numbers, a rise in e-commerce and a growing cohort of homeworkers haven t stopped SWFs and pension funds from pouring millions into office and retail real estate.
Sovereign wealth and pension funds expanded their allocations to real estate in 2020 more than to any other type of alternative asset. They also closed the highest number of deals in the sector, compared to other industries such as technology and infrastructure.
According to Preqin data, among alternatives assets, sovereign wealth funds allocated an average $3.84 billion to real estate, a 10.3% increase from last year. Meanwhile, their allocations to hedge funds, private equity and infrastructure showed relatively smaller increases of between 1.5% and 2.9%.
The pension fund will sell an 83.5% stake in the transcontinental pathway.
The infrastructure arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS) has completed a $312 million sale of the Detroit River Rail Tunnel to transcontinental railway company Canadian Pacific (CP).
Canadian Pacific will take full ownership of the railway after the transaction, the firm said this month. It purchased an 83.5% stake from OMERS and previously held just a 16.5% stake in the tunnel.
The Ontario pension fund for municipal employees has been invested in the Detroit River Rail Tunnel for nearly two decades. OMERS, which boasts a sizable allocation to infrastructure, invests $16.2 billion to the asset class, or nearly one-quarter of its $82.7 billion total portfolio that is managed by in-house managers. In fiscal year 2019, the allocation returned 8.7%, beating its benchmark of 7.9%.