British Fund Giant Legal & General Buys Stake In Taurus To Deepen U.S. Multifamily Push
British pension fund titan Legal & General has announced the next stage in its U.S. expansion, partnering up with real estate private equity firm Taurus Investment Holdings.
L&G acquired a stake in the Boston-based firm and committed to providing it with up to $200M of seed capital to invest in multifamily real estate, it announced in a release Friday.
“Asset management is the cornerstone of our growth strategy, and scale in private markets globally is key to those ambitions,” L&G CEO António Simões said in a statement. “We believe our partnership with Taurus will accelerate our progress.”
L&G first launched its U.S. asset management business in 2006 and now aims to expand its global private markets platform to $112B in assets under management by 2028.
“Our partnership with Taurus accelerates our ability to capitalize on this market and significantly scale our expertise and execution capabilities,” L&G Asset Management Head of U.S. Real Estate Equity and Private Markets Alexia Gottschalch said in a statement.
Taurus, which specializes in industrial and multifamily acquisition, development, financing, leasing and sales, has a portfolio worth approximately $11B across the U.S., Germany, the UK and other countries.
Industrial and multifamily have high demand and strong historical performances, L&G said in the release. Together, the two asset classes have grown from 35% of institutional real estate portfolios in 2000 to 63% this year, the release says, citing data from the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries.
“Alongside Taurus, we can now seek to deliver large scale projects that address the increasing demand for quality housing and logistics infrastructure, with a focus on sustainability and innovative financing solutions,” Gottschalch said.
L&G was drawn to the investor for its track record of implementing value-add strategies, including decarbonization solutions like geothermal networks and deep energy retrofits, which reduce on-site energy usage by at least 40%.
Within the last year, Taurus has completed construction on a six-building multifamily community in Florida with TPG Real Estate, acquired a 19-property portfolio of mostly industrial assets across Arizona and Texas, and bought a five-building southern New Jersey industrial portfolio.
“Taurus is pleased to enter this partnership with Legal & General which enhances and expands their access to US real estate markets, while providing Taurus with an injection of capital from an impressive, long-standing financial services group and global investor,” Taurus CEO Peter Merrigan said in a statement.
The announcement follows L&G’s partnership with developer Ancora in 2022, which aimed to acquire $4B of life sciences real estate over five years. The pension fund plans to continue investing strategically in life sciences as part of its U.S. expansion, L&G Asset Management Managing Director for Urban Regeneration Wes Erlam told Bisnow last month, although that market has cooled rapidly.
“The partnership we created, the Ancora-L&G business, is actually focused on anchor institutions rather than life science pure play,” he said. “It will manage life science and development assets, but it's not the case that it's reliant on that market in isolation. It's much more around partnering with the right types of anchor institutions.”
