科恩＆Steers.Looking Beyond REITs and Real Estate

Martin Cohen and Robert Steers are nothing if not patient. Sitting side by side in Steers’ Midtown Manhattan office, the co-founders of Cohen & Steers take turns explaining how their firm was at least seven years too early when it began peddling publicly traded real estate investment trusts in the 1980s. “You can’t affect when investment tastes change,” says the white-haired and patrician Steers. “So we said, ‘Let’s put our heads down and just keep cranking out the best record we can. When the world decides they like what we do, we’ll be the only horse out there in the race, and assets will come.’ ”

这两个老朋友通过其UPS和Downs专注于REIT市场，成为行业领导者，而其他资产经理竞争以提供从股票和债券到替代投资的一切。Steers指责平庸的投资业务，引用积极管理人员未能分离他们的基准。“多样化是失败的公式，”59岁的人说，从科恩，64厅工作。

But Cohen & Steers has diversified too. Synonymous with REITs for almost three decades, the firm began moving into other investments ten years ago. Its newest vehicle is the Real Assets Fund, which includes exposure to commodities and natural resources. Steers and Cohen say their expansion perfectly positions them for the next wave of investment growth. When interest rates rise, they reckon, investors will dump bonds for real assets that will protect them against inflation and throw off income over the long term. The two also think more institutions will embrace REITs, which they say outperform private real estate while offering coveted liquidity.

科恩＆Steers通过分别在2003年和2004年开展首选股票基金和上市的基础设施基金，开始了多元化的道路。在一个投标减轻单一资产课程的求助方面，合作伙伴选择了足够类似的投资，以便他们的专业知识给他们一个优势。

除了这些策略和岁月的真实资产基金外，拥有240名员工的Cohen＆Steers，现在提供了一系列的创收股票和一系列全球房地产投资组合，包括一个用于新兴市场。它还拥有一项小型替代方案，包括全球房地产长短对冲基金和私人房地产战略，并在布鲁塞尔，香港，伦敦和西雅图开设了投资办事处。科恩坚持认为，公司的未来比过去更有趣。

Launched in 1986, Cohen & Steers grew steadily after its lean early years by capitalizing on a novel idea — the easy-to-access REIT — and insatiable demand for stocks. Along the way it weathered setbacks such as the technology stock bubble of the late 1990s and the 2008 crash.

The latter event proved the founders’ thesis: Focus your energies on one thing, and you’ll win. As REITs swooned, Cohen & Steers led a recapitalization of the market. When the recovery started, investors flocked to the independent firm. It also gained as institutional investors saw the benefits of investing in real estate through a listed — hence liquid — vehicle. Cohen & Steers’ assets grew to $45.8 billion at the end of 2012 from $29.8 billion in December 2007. Last year the publicly traded shop earned $274 million in fees.

Although global turmoil has shaken Cohen & Steers of late, its long-term numbers are solid. Through January 31 its U.S. Realty Total Return Composite, which consists of the core U.S. REIT strategy and the Cohen & Steers Realty Shares mutual fund, had returned 12.1 percent annually since its 1985 inception, compared with 10.8 percent for the FTSE Nareit Equity REIT Index. Over five years the composite has gained an annual 8.1 percent, versus its benchmark’s 6.4 percent.

科恩＆Steers.’ rise parallels the development of REITs, whose U.S. market capitalization has climbed to $544.4 billion from about $10 billion in the early 1990s, according to the Washington-based National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (Nareit). “Many of the name-brand REITs that exist today got off the ground and were engineered with corporate governance, balance sheets and business strategies that were in part informed by Cohen & Steers,” says Steven Wechsler, president and CEO of Nareit.

The two partners spent many years educating investors about the benefits of REITs, even as consultants and institutional investors remained skeptical. Long the Rodney Dangerfield of the investment world, the REIT has won respect, says Cohen & Steers president and CIO Joseph Harvey, who joined the firm in 1992.

An early convert to REITs, Fairfax County Retirement Systems began investing with Cohen & Steers in 1989. CIO Laurnz Swartz, a 15-year veteran of the $5.8 billion Virginia system, says the board agreed to avoid private real estate and use REITs for all of its exposure to the asset class. “Liquidity was a big part of that decision,” Swartz explains.

Although Real Assets manages just $74 million, Cohen and Steers are undaunted. “As interest rates rise there will be a tsunami of capital that leaves fixed income,” says Brooklyn native Cohen, the quieter of the two.

长大在纽约黑麦长大和仍然生活的阉牛同样看涨。“如果我们是对的，这将是一个非常大的部门，”他争辩。“许多最大的捐赠捐赠有20％的实际资产划分，其中许多人难以确定哪些投资在通胀环境中茁壮成长。”

Cohen and Steers met when they were both analysts at Citibank in New York in the late 1970s. In 1980, when Cohen was managing a real estate stock fund for Citi’s pension clients, Steers left the bank to become CIO of Greenwich, Connecticut–based National Securities and Research Corp., which was later sold to Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co. He hired Cohen, who had dabbled in REITs as a pet project.

重新获得were created under president Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. Modeled on mutual funds, they gave mainstream investors access to commercial real estate at a time when America’s richest families still controlled the sector through private companies. The New York Stock Exchange listed the first REIT in 1965, and tax-sheltered real estate partnerships raised billions of dollars in the 1980s.

In 1985, while at National Securities, Cohen and Steers started the first mutual fund focused on REITs and other real estate assets. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 prevented real estate partnerships from sheltering earnings and allowed REITs to be internally managed. Believing these changes would spur growth, Cohen and Steers decided to launch their own firm that year.

But by 1989 a commercial real estate downturn had begun. Although their shop had some marquee clients, including Stanford University’s endowment and telecommunications company Bell Atlantic, the two partners struggled, even recruiting their wives to work for free.

科恩说:“我们有一个“鸡生蛋还是蛋生鸡”问题,一个accomplished classical guitarist. “There wasn’t critical mass.” Adds Steers: “Institutional investors used to laugh. We could buy the whole REIT industry, and it wouldn’t move the dial for us.”

1991年，在斯坦福的建议，科恩和斯蒂尔推出了一个开放式共同基金。该大学与旧金山的查尔斯施瓦布公司建立了关系，该公司刚刚开始其现在的基金的现在的超市分销平台。（科恩＆Steers Realty股票现在管理49亿美元的资产。）

The firm’s fate started to turn that year when Hyde Park, New York–based Kimco Realty Corp. went public in the first successful listing of an equity REIT in many years. REITs started tapping the public markets to withstand the downturn. The motto at the time was “Don’t go broke; go public,” president Harvey recounts. From 1992 to 1995 there were more than 90 REIT IPOs. In 1993 new legislation made it easier for pension plans to invest in securitized real estate, and Simon Property Group, based in Indianapolis, raised $840 million in the largest IPO to date. By then Cohen & Steers had competitors, but it was one of the few pure REIT plays. Today, CBRE Clarion Securities, Fidelity Investments, LaSalle Investment Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Rreef Real Estate are among its biggest rivals.

The next challenge was the 1997–’98 bear market in REITs. But instead of retrenching, Cohen & Steers hired staff and prepared for life after the correction. A turnaround came quickly, but it proved short-lived when investors began shunning income stocks in favor of technology and other growth companies.

After the tech bubble burst in 2000, though, REITs looked attractive again. Publicly traded real estate got another boost from investors seeking to globalize their portfolios. Only the largest and most sophisticated players had access to global private real estate, so REITs were an easy way to increase allocations.

In 2003, Cohen & Steers expanded into preferred stocks. It had first invested in REIT-issued preferred stocks during the dot-com era, when they were trading at huge discounts. “Here’s an area where no one else is doing this, they are complex, and we can add value through research and active management,” says Harvey of the rationale for the new strategy.

The next year the firm started investing in listed infrastructure companies, a small sector that it believes may follow the same trajectory as REITs. “It was a capital-intensive business that generated regular streams of income and paid a dividend,” Cohen notes. “You wouldn’t know the difference between a utility and a REIT if you took the names off.” Also in 2004, Cohen & Steers went public on the NYSE in a deal that raised $104.3 million.

The financial crisis improved the firm’s fortunes, even if the immediate effects were painful. Because real estate had always been financed using debt, highly leveraged REITs were particularly vulnerable during the credit crunch. The FTSE Nareit Equity REIT Index fell 37.7 percent in 2008, while Cohen & Steers’ U.S. Realty  Total Return composite lost 34.2 percent. Assets plummeted to $15.1 billion, and net outflows were $3.4 billion by the end of the year.

但事故凸显了Cohen & Steers commitment to the sector and revealed how much influence it had over the underlying REITs in its portfolios. The two co-founders assured staff that they would keep investment professionals. They had no debt and about $4.55 per share in cash; the majority of equity was in the hands of Cohen, Steers and employees, who now own 60 percent of the firm. “We saw the system where we never thought it would be,” Steers says. The rapid decline in REIT valuations meant that clients would have locked in big losses by cashing out, he adds. “By the time they were thinking about doing something, prices had gone down too much.”

To lead a recapitalization of the industry, Cohen & Steers raised money by selling European and Asian REITs that had held much of their value and dipped into $500 million in reserves for redemptions. It offered money to REITs only if they would use the Cohen & Steers imprimatur to raise new equity and refinance debt. In the end, more than a dozen REITs took the money, including high-profile names like AMB Property Corp., Prologis and Simon Property.

“Cohen & Steers’ role sent a vote of confidence to shareholders,” says Michael Kirby, chairman and director of research at Newport Beach, California–based real estate research firm Green Street Advisors. Nareit’s Wechsler agrees: “They helped separate the wheat from the chaff during the crisis to help people understand that there was tangible value embedded in these companies.”

The firm started gaining assets in 2009 as investors saw value in the downtrodden real estate sector. More institutional interest helped too. In 2009, Cohen & Steers drew almost $4 billion in net inflows; 81 percent came from institutional investors, which had gotten wise to the true cost of tying up their money in illiquid private real estate vehicles. “When you are illiquid, you need a superior return to compensate for the risks of a private investment,” says president Harvey.

Institutions still have about 80 percent of their real estate allocations in private funds, according to Seattle-based Russell Investments. But Cohen & Steers’ research shows that over the 30-year period ended January 31, listed REITs beat core private real estate funds by, on average, 498 basis points annually. They also did better over shorter time frames. In 2010 and 2011, Cohen & Steers raised a combined $13.5 billion; again institutions accounted for 81 percent of the total.

但在过去的两年里，公司的美国和全球REIT策略因欧洲债务等宏观经济力量而导致他们的基准落后于他们的基准。2012年，依靠基础研究的科恩和阉牛患了9.5亿美元的净流出。其中大部分都在日本，公司借鉴了几个共同基金。在过去的几年里，大雷特顾客，日本投资者一直逃跑，因为收益率下降。为了打击表现不佳，科恩＆Steers已经改变，其中包括促销朱鸿到最后的全球房地产负责人。自7月以来，全球REIT战略已将其基准击败了150个基点。

In these difficult times, diversification has turned out to be a blessing. The Global Infrastructure Composite surpassed its index by 3.9 percentage points in 2012 and 2011, while U.S. Preferred Securities outstripped its hurdle by 5.9 percentage points last year and 1.8 percentage points in 2011.

随着老龄化投资者以及养老基金和其他机构长期寻找产量，通胀保护和稳定，科恩＆Steers认为它已经发现了甜蜜的地方。科恩说，债券的三十年长的牛市最终将结束，使实际资产核心，更具吸引力。由于宽敞的货币政策，世界各地的央行已经将纪录量的流动性纳入系统中。Cohen相信，这将导致通货膨胀更高。实际资产倾向于在此类环境中提供最佳回报。

科恩＆Steers.’ Real Assets Fund exemplifies how the firm is looking ahead. The fledgling fund’s holdings encompass not only REITs but gold; currencies, through the use of short-duration fixed-income instruments; natural-resource equities; and commodity futures. Director of quantitative strategies and hedging    Yigal Jhirad, who runs Real Assets, says it grew out of investors asking how real estate fared against inflation.

“我们认为这是一个机会看看引擎盖，询问房地产是否是全部和最终的通货膨胀，或者是我们应该拥有的其他替代资产课程，”Jhirad解释说，他加入坚实的公司2007年从摩根斯坦利，他领导的投资组合和衍生品战略。在从20世纪70年代开始看各种投资环境之后，科恩和斯特尔意识到“通货膨胀很复杂，没有一个资产类别可以为各种类型的通货膨胀提供对冲，无论是能源驱动，劳动力驱动还是由货币政策推动，“ 他说。

When the firm launched Real Assets in January 2012, it took the unusual step of enlisting two outside subadvisers, which it calls the “Cohen & Steers of their asset classes,” to manage commodities and natural resources: New York’s Gresham Investment Management and London-based Investec Asset Management, respectively.

“We believe that ultimately there will be inflation, and even if there isn’t inflation in the traditional sense, we have a growing world population,” Cohen says, pointing to demand for natural resources, commodities, housing and food. “There should be good fundamentals for companies that are involved in these businesses.”

真实资产是一种与几个杠杆的通货膨胀战略。科恩＆Steers使用了房地产作为基础，分层自然资源股票和商品期货，提供了一个增长机会，给出了对潜在资产的新兴市场的需求以及有限的供应。这两个组件还提供通货膨胀保护。经理增加了黄金来管理波动性和通货膨胀，以及通过短期固定收入工具接触全球货币。

Above all, Cohen & Steers sought to address investor concerns about committing to the fund by broadening its mandate to deliver long-term growth and diversification. “It’s not just a one-trick pony,” Jhirad says. “We wanted to also provide a smoother investment experience across economic environments and across inflation cycles.” If the firm could sell the fund as a diversifier and growth asset, clients wouldn’t just invest when they thought inflation was about to climb, which is hard to predict.

真正的资产是考验科恩和阉牛愿意推动多元化的考验。最终，他们向专家留下了陌生的资产课程。“多年来，他们大大增加了他们的业务规模，但他们几乎留在收入生产资产上，”Fairfax的Swartz说。“这就是董事会在一开始被吸引的内容。”

Steers likes Real Assets’ chances — eventually, anyway. He compares the fund’s launch to when he and Cohen started their firm. “Will it take three years to catch on? We don’t know,” Steers says. “But we want to be there with a best-in-class fund when the world decides this is what they want.”