Who Owns Aermont Capital: The Keppel Buyout, the Funds and the Pinewood Record

Aermont Capital is no longer independent. The London based real estate investment manager, founded in 2007 and best known to the public as the owner of Pinewood Studios, agreed in November 2023 to sell itself to Singapore's Keppel Ltd. The first half of that sale completed on 29 April 2024. The second half is scheduled for 2028. Anyone looking at a building, a fund or a development and finding this name attached to it is looking at a business that is roughly half owned by a Singapore listed company today and due to be wholly owned by it within a few years.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the firm is not a developer in the sense most buyers mean. It does not sell apartments to individuals. It raises money from institutions and buys, repositions and sells large assets. The name turns up in the ownership chain behind properties rather than on a sales contract.

Who founded it and who runs it

Aermont Capital was established in 2007 by Léon Bressler, the former chief executive of the French property group Unibail. It traded initially as PW Real Assets and was spun out of the New York investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners in 2015, taking its current name at that point.

Bressler is chairman. Paul Golding, who worked previously at Norges Bank and Merrill Lynch, is managing partner. Bisnow reported in December 2023 that the firm ran on about 40 staff, which is small for the amount of capital involved and typical of the European opportunistic end of the market.

Who the money comes from

Aermont manages capital for more than 50 institutional limited partners, described by Keppel as public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations across several regions. Individual investors are not named in the public announcements, which is normal for closed end private funds and is one reason this part of the market is hard to trace from the outside.

Reported performance across the fund series, as summarised by Bisnow in December 2023: Fund I, raised in 2007, returned 15% net internal rate of return. Fund II returned a 13% project level net IRR and a 1.9 times equity multiple. Fund III returned 32% net IRR. Fund V closed in March 2022 at 3.8 billion euros and had completed a single investment at the time of reporting. Keppel's own announcement put the firm's average realised return at a 25% gross IRR and 2.8 times gross multiple on invested capital as at November 2023. Those are manager reported figures in both cases rather than audited public filings.

Assets under management were put at 24 billion Singapore dollars by Mingtiandi at the time of the deal and at 14 billion pounds by Bisnow, the gap reflecting different measures and currencies rather than a dispute.

The Keppel transaction in detail

Keppel announced the acquisition on 30 November 2023. The total consideration is up to 931.86 million euros, structured in two stages: 356.86 million euros for the first 50% and 575 million euros for the remaining 50%, the second tranche expected in 2028 and subject to regulatory approvals. Keppel said it would fund the initial investment through a mix of cash and treasury shares. Bisnow described the deal as an off market transaction worth around 800 million pounds, priced at about 13 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, and reported that Keppel chief executive Loh Chin Hua made the first approach in April 2023.

Keppel completed the first 50% of Aermont on 29 April 2024. The stated strategic logic was scale: Keppel's funds under management rose to roughly 80 billion Singapore dollars from 55 billion at the end of December 2023, against a target of 100 billion by the end of 2026. Keppel has suggested the European platform alone could reach around 60 billion Singapore dollars by 2030.