ING Clarion Global Property

ING Clarion 

Investment Style: Core

ING Clarion Real Estate Securities is 100.0 percent-owned by ING. The team has existed under a number of different firms going back to Audit Investments, founded in 1969 by Kenneth Campbell. CRA Real Estate Securities was founded by Kenneth Campbell, Ritson Ferguson, and Jarrett Kling. Clarion Real Estate Securities and Clarion Partners became wholly-owned subsidiaries of ING Group of the Netherlands in 1998, although operates autonomously as the US component of ING’s Real Estate division. The team is headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, with additional offices in London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. 

ING follows a top-down bottom-up approach to investing in global real estate securities. The top-down decision is expected to account for approximately one-third of alpha. The Global Investment Policy Committee (GIPC) determines country and regional allocations as well as property type weighting bands. This committee meets on a quarterly basis and discusses items such as the macroeconomic environment, private market trends, relative valuations versus stocks and bonds, and valuations of listed property stocks. As well as consisting of senior portfolio managers, the GIPC also includes senior research and private real estate professionals. 

Bottom-up stock selection is carried out by the analysts and portfolio managers. Analysts are responsible for generating three-year cashflow projections for each of their companies as well as estimating net asset values from proprietary cap rate information. This along with information garnered from manager meetings and property tours is fed into a factor-based model, Relative Value Analysis Ranking (RVA), which includes both qualitative and quantitative factors. 

Factors are assigned to three broad categories - valuation and property (55.0 percent), management and strategy (25.0 percent), and capital structure (20.0 percent). (Weightings do however vary by region - there is a bigger weighting to management in Asia, while net asset value is more of a factor in Europe and Asia). Both regional portfolio managers must agree on stock decisions. More significant changes to the portfolio are presented to the Investment Committee, of which all six portfolio managers are members. 

ING Real Estate Securities' team comprises over 20 investment professionals. The global product is overseen by a four-person team which includes Ritson Ferguson (MD and CIO), Kenneth Campbell (MD), Indraneel Karlekar (Head of Global Research and Strategy), and Julie Terres (Senior Portfolio Analyst). There are co-portfolio managers for each region – Joseph Smith and Kenneth Weinberg for the US, Steve Burton and Simon Robson-Brown for Europe, and Chris Reich and Nelson Wong for Asia.