Drake Real Estate Partners, a real estate investment manager pursuing a value-add strategy focused on under the radar opportunities, announced the closing of its fifth flagship fund, Drake Real Estate Partners Fund V (DREP Fund V) with more than $515 million in commitments, exceeding its $500 million target.
Drake’s investor base has evolved and diversified from its original roots in large LatAm based family offices to a predominantly U.S. institutional capital base in DREP Fund V.
“We surpassed our $500 million target raise with $515 million, plus co-investment allocations” said Nicolas Ibanez, co-founder and president of Drake. “This outcome is a testament to the long-term relationships we”ve built and our deliberate expansion into the U.S. and European institutional landscape, which complements our longstanding ties in Latin America. Achieving this scale of fundraising in the current environment is not only a major milestone, it’s a strategic advantage as we deploy capital in a heavily dislocated environment.”
Founded in 2012, Drake implements a value-add approach by acquiring income-producing real estate assets, generally at a significant discount to replacement cost, and driving value through repositioning, leasing and improving operations. The firm focuses predominantly on smaller transactions — generally $5 million to %25 million of equity — benefiting from the less efficient market dynamics in that target range. Drake frequently acquires its assets from long-time, non-institutional owners, overseeing capital improvements that these assets were previously lacking, and assembling them into attractive, scalable portfolios for future buyers.
This fund vintage presents one of the most compelling risk/return profiles we’ve seen since the firm’s inception,” said David Cotterman, Drake co-founder and chief investment officer. “We’re creating value-add to opportunistic type returns while taking core plus to light value-add risk, in longstanding themes we’ve researched and invested in for more than 13 years.”
Over the past five years, Drake has increasingly pursued fragmented sub-sectors within industrial and residential themes, such as industrial outdoor storage, small bay industrial and manufactured housing, while opportunistically accessing more traditional property types, such as multifamily and data centers.
