Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors hires Joyce Shapiro as MD for real assets

NEW YORK: Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors (FTREA) on May 11 announced that it has hired Joyce T Shapiro to head a newly established business team dedicated to real asset multi-manager investment strategies, expanding the group’s capabilities to include infrastructure, energy, water, agriculture and timber.

“Institutional investors today have shown an increased need for strategies that can provide reasonably predictable cash flows, inflation protection and the potential for out performance necessary to meet future pension liabilities, “said Shapiro in a statement on May, 11.

“At the same time, rising demand for natural resources and massive capital requirements for infrastructure development worldwide has driven the need for new investment solutions. We believe real asset funds have an important role to play in this new environment, and we’re confident that Franklin Templeton can be a provider of choice to our clients seeking exposure in this asset class,” she added.

Managing director and head of FTREA, Jack Foster said: “For nearly two decades, Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors has focused on identifying best-in-class managers globally for our private real estate, multi-manager mandates, seeking to provide investors an important source of portfolio diversification and the potential for attractive risk-adjusted returns.”

“We believe real assets share many of the same economic fundamentals as real estate, and private real asset multi-manager funds therefore are the natural extension of our business as we continue to focus on meeting evolving investor needs,” he said.

Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors’ approach to investing real asset portfolios will entail managing risk on various levels: Sectors, operations, geography, consumption groups and energy inputs, to name a few variables in the group’s portfolio construction model.

Before joining Franklin Templeton, Shapiro played a key role in transitioning Brookfield Asset Management, a public operator of real assets, into the private funds management business, developing distinct real asset private funds in timber, agriculture, infrastructure, power and real estate.

She spent 12 years at LaSalle Investment Management, most recently as International Director, managing the North American client team, and previously managed institutional portfolios for the organisation. She was also instrumental in launching and developing the firm’s private fund business in Asia.

Shapiro has also held management roles in real estate groups at several multinational banks including J P Morgan, Citibank and Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan. She has nearly 20 years experience as a portfolio manager of real estate and her experience extends to each of the major global real asset classes. In previous roles, she helped to establish real estate restructuring businesses in Japan and Australia and helped to launch one of the largest US bank OREO (Other Real Estate Owned) groups in the early 1990s.