"The Dominoes Are Fallling": Three Largest UK Property Funds Freeze $12 Billion In Assets, More To Come
By Tyler Durden
As first reported last night, and following up this morning, in an episode painfully reminiscent of the Bear hedge fund “freezes” that preceded the bank’s 2008 collapse and the great financial crisis , first Standard Life halted trading in its property fund, followed hours later by both Aviva and M&G which likewise announced they are suspending trading in their own portfolio funds. And, as Bloomberg summarizes, three of the U.K.’s largest real estate funds have frozen almost 9.1 billion pounds ($12 billion) of assets after Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union sparked a flurry of redemptions.
These were the first major dominoes to fall as a result of the confusion resulting from the Brexit vote. M&G Investments, Aviva Investors and Standard Life Investments halted withdrawals because they don’t have enough cash to immediately repay investors. About 24.5 billion pounds is allocated to U.K. real estate funds, according to the Investment Association.
The rush by private investors to withdraw money prompted M&G, which held 7.7% in cash before the vote, to suspend its 4.4 billion-pound Property Portfolio fund and Aviva Investors to freeze its 1.8 billion-pound Property Trust on Tuesday. Standard Life halted trading on its 2.9 billion-pound U.K. real estate fund on Monday. The cash position for Aviva and Standard Life’s funds at the end of May was 9.3% and 13.1% respectively.
The market reaction has been swift and brutal, sending stocks of the property-linked asset managers crashing.
Standard Life is among firms, including Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, Henderson Group Plc, Legal & General Group Plc and M&G to adjust the value of assets in their property funds last week. Holdings in the funds range from an office building in Birmingham, to a mall in Newcastle and retail warehouses in Northampton.
“Investor redemptions in the fund have risen markedly because of the high levels of uncertainty in the U.K. commercial property market since the outcome of the European Union referendum,” M&G said on its website. Outflows “have now reached a point where M&G believes it can best protect the interests of the funds’ shareholders by seeking a temporary suspension.”
“The dominoes are starting to fall in the U.K. commercial property market,” said Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. “The problem these funds face is that it takes time to sell commercial property to meet withdrawals, and the cash buffers built up by the managers have been eroded by investors heading for the door.”
Cited by Bloomberg, “the drop-off in inflows and then redemptions forces these funds to eat into their liquidity buffer,” much of which is held in real estate investment trust shares, Mike Prew, an analyst at Jefferies LLC, said in a note to clients on Tuesday.
While traders around the globe had been mostly focused on the downstream effects slamming Italian banks in recent weeks, the news of “freezing” UK property funds spooked global markets, and as a result the pound fell to its weakest level in three decades against the dollar Tuesday, surpassing lows reached in the aftermath …read more
