Judge's report

DNB has a strong position in the Nordic real estate market with a portfolio focused on offices, shopping centres and hotels/other in Norway and Sweden. The firm has an extensive network across the real estate industry and can capitalise on a broad access to market and off-market deals. The strategy is to invest in properties with a central and strategic location in the largest cities in Norway and Sweden. In Sweden, investments are managed through strategic partnerships with local managers.

The properties are managed with a long-time horizon and a strong focus on ESG, which is an integral part of the investment process and the property management. As an active manager, the sector allocation and the underlying portfolios are subject to change according to market conditions, future trends and property-specific assessments.

Velliv’s cumulative total returns continue to impress. It has a strong internal approach for analysing and researching new investment sectors and opportunities, including conducting quantitative and qualitative business plans for each investment tailored to the general strategy for the real estate asset class, financial models, statistics of demographics, analysis of economic data and trends, and benchmarking asset attributes. The fund has a relatively large legacy office portfolio, accounting for more than 40% of its total real estate allocation. Velliv seeks to reduce this exposure and increase its allocation to development projects within logistics, industrial and residential – either by re-investing net income into construction projects of existing assets or through acquisitions. Velliv’s most recent strategic initiative was to invest in and develop intergenerational residential communities that house mixed generations in a co-living scheme. The plan is to expand the intergenerational co-living concept to rest of Denmark under a common sub-Velliv brand, called NaboLiv. Velliv has strong partnerships with other Danish pension funds via co-investments which contribute to the diversification of risk and reduction of concentration risk.