David Swensen modeled Yale's real estate strategy on private equity and VC
Alan Forman · Alan Forman – Yale Endowment Real Estate (EP.340) · Sep 25, 2023 · at 28:27
Alan Forman discusses the history of the Yale Investments Office and how Chief Investment Officer David Swensen redesigned Yale's real estate portfolio from direct ownership to commingled partnerships.
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“David Swenson was a first principles investor, and he looked at the real estate business in the eighties and said, this doesn't make any sense. And he thought that the fee-based nature of the business, there was no alignment of interest. There was lots of separate accounts. It just wasn't the right model for how he was looking at it with a blank sheet of paper. He looked over at the private equity venture capital business and said, that's a business that is structured in the right way, and we should model Our real estate business off of that, and that's what we did.”
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