Two of Aviva Investors’ most senior and long-serving real estate directors have left the company.
Neil McLeod, head of central London, has left as part of a process to refresh the fund manager’s property team. Chris Perrott, director of central London offices, is also leaving next month.
McLeod had been with Aviva for almost 17 years, having joined in 2002 from LaSalle Investment Management, and Perrott has been at the company for more than 15 years, having joined in 2004 from CBRE.
Under McLeod’s leadership Aviva formed a £1bn joint venture development programme with Canadian pension fund PSP and built out One Fitzroy Place, W1, alongside Exemplar and Kaupthing.
Aviva is now looking to recruit two new senior executives into the London team. In the interim its central London operation will be overseen jointly by head of real estate asset management Melanie Collett, who joined from Round Hill Capital last April; head of development James Stevens, who joined from Aberdeen Standard Investments at the start of this year; and head of offices Barry Hill, who has been at the company since 2006.
Last May, Aviva formed Aviva Investors Real Assets, bringing together its £37bn of direct real estate, infrastructure, structured finance and private debt assets under management and selling its Real Estate Multi-Manager business to LaSalle Investment Management. Ed Casal, who had been chief executive of Aviva’s global real estate division, moved to LaSalle with the REMM business and Mark Vesey was appointed chief investment officer of AIRA to lead the division. Since then AIRA has bulked up again, hiring more than 50 people.
In the UK, AIRA is continuing to pursue its “cluster” strategy set out by Casal in 2017, focusing purely on the cities or regions which it believes have the highest areas of growth and steadily disposing of assets outside of those. Its target areas are London, Thames Valley, Cambridge, Birmingham and Greater Manchester.
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