Sponsor/Manager(s): Concert Real Estate Corporation, managed by Concert Properties; Mortgage Fund One (MFO) is managed by ACM Advisors.
Pension Fund and Other Participant(s): Concert Properties is capitalized by 22 British Columbia-based and national pension funds, including the Telecommunications Workers Pension Plan, the IWA-Forestry Industry Pension Plan, the Pulp and Paper Industry Pension Plan, the Teamsters Canadian Pension Plan and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Pension Plan, as well as other building trades plans. MFO is supported by 13 pension funds, most of which also participate in Concert.
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia.
Total Assets Under Management: Concert Properties has assets totaling $245 million (though assets are expected to rise to $500 million in early 2001), while MFO has $220 million.
Year of Inception: Concert Properties and MFO were established in 1989 and 1992, respectively.
In the 1980s, British Columbia was the scene of the first major effort in Canada to establish a vehicle pooling pension fund assets for targeted investing in real estate development that was, in many aspects, comparable in goals and design features to such long-standing American programs as the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and ULLICO’s J for Jobs. In a collaboration involving British Columbia’s labour movement, multi-employer private sector pension funds, the City of Vancouver and provincial governments, and various privately-owned developers and investors, Concert Properties was born with initial capitalization of over $27 million.
An original aim of Concert Properties was to finance the construction of new, affordablypriced rental and other residential properties in British Columbia, with close attention paid to the needs of the Greater Vancouver region. This latter focus was based on a seemingly intractable problem of low vacancy rates in the city, due to chronic shortages of affordable housing, particularly rental apartments, then current. Municipal government concern about this issue encouraged an offer to lease unused, governmentowned land (among other forms of support) for one of Concert’s premiere initiatives – the building of new for-rent units in several Vancouver neighbourhoods in 1990-1995.
With such activity, Concert Properties emerged, almost overnight, as the leading investor in new rental properties in Vancouver and British Columbia, including during cyclical downturns in real estate markets – a fact acknowledged at the time by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It also became recognized for employing unionized contractors in projects, which gave local union members in construction and related sectors (including members of some of the pension plans supplying Concert) full benefit of the jobs created.