Real Assets Practices

We cover all types of real estate investment and ancillary industries and understand the needs of the key investment players – private equity, operators, sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and family offices. As specialists, we understand the key real estate functions of deal origination, capital structuring, asset management, and operations and are used to finding the best talent in each area and creating synergies between teams and functions.

We have deep expertise in the hospitality and leisure sector, with a particular focus on hotel brand development and expansion from a real estate point of view. We have worked with hotel investors, owners, and hotel operating companies. We have significant experience placing C-suite, board members, and senior executives in a wide variety of roles covering finance, legal, risk, investment and asset management, research and brand development, and construction.

The last decade has seen burgeoning investment in infrastructure. Investors have recognized the fundamentals driving demand as well the opportunities for private sector investment in an area where Government traditionally took the lead.  This increased allocation to infrastructure has been a prime force behind the need to build global investment teams to direct these efforts.

We have worked on behalf of private equity, sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and pension funds to create well-balanced teams able to acquire, invest in, develop, manage and operate these assets.

Digital infrastructure is a relatively new sector but showing rapid acceleration as businesses of all kinds ramp up their use of data analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile, and digital telecommunications. Digital infrastructure comprises the physical and logistical resources that are necessary to enable the use of data, computerized devices, methods, systems, and processes. We are finding vastly increased focus on hiring talent that understands and is experienced in this specialist sector.

On the energy side, we work mainly with renewable energy firms, innovative, green energy funds, and carbon capture/energy storage companies.  We are seeing significantly increased investment in renewable energy developments. We hire senior teams and cover CEO and all C-suite positions as well as finance, legal, risk, sales and marketing, investment professional, asset management, research.

Private equity investment is our sweet spot. We have worked closely with some of the world’s largest private equity firms in executing mandates to build teams and capabilities first in Europe, then Asia and the Middle East, and now increasingly in emerging markets. Private equity has fundamentally changed the face of real asset investment by driving increased opportunistic and value-add investing, ‘professionalizing’ the deployment of capital, and pouring money into major infrastructure and logistics developments.

We understand private equity – how it operates and what it needs and has worked hard to deliver top talent to these organizations and expand the playing field from the typical M&A investment bank frame of reference to a much wider palette of asset managers, architects, and engineers. We have also worked in close partnership with private equity to build strong work cultures and acknowledge the power of more diverse workplaces.