Ex-UBS Team Gets Backing To Raise Property Fund

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Mitchell Sikora and Peter Finley, former UBS AG employees, founded a firm with backing from Apollo Real Estate Advisors and Ramius Capital Group LLC to help fund managers raise real estate investment pools.

Their firm, New York-based JT Partners, is getting started at a time of record fund formation by private equity firms and increasing demand from pension plans for assets that can produce higher returns than stocks and bonds. So-called placement agents such as JT Partners usually get paid a percentage of the money they raise for clients.

Property funds may raise a record $65 billion globally this year, up 44% from last year, according to a September report from London-based Private Equity Intelligence Ltd. That implies potential revenue of more than $650 million for placement agents as a whole if all that money is secured through them.

“It’s a profitable and good business,” Mr. Sikora said in a telephone interview. “There’s a lot of demand for private equity real estate investments so there’s a lot of money coming in. We may have five or six clients a year, but we’ll probably look at 75 or 100.”

Before founding JT Partners, Mr. Sikora, 44, and Mr. Finley, 52, were executive directors in UBS’s real estate, leisure, and lodging group. Mr. Sikora led the group’s real estate private equity placements. Apollo and Ramius were two of their clients at UBS.

New York-based Ramius is a hedge fund that also invests in real estate. The firm manages about $7.6 billion, according to its Web site. Ramius was founded in 1994 by Peter Cohen, who was chief executive officer of Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc. from 1983 to 1990.


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