A Solid Global Real Estate Fund

Jonathan Wallace: Bronze-rated Brookfield Global Listed Real Estate benefits from a strong and experienced team that implements a robust investment process, which has led to attractive results for investors. Plus, the fund comes with reasonable fees.

This fund benefits from an experienced team's steady oversight. Managers Jason Baine and Bernhard Krieg have overseen this real estate-focused fund since its November 2011 inception. They lead a team of nine analysts that split coverage by geography and sector. The team also can leverage the resources of Brookfield's direct real estate arm.

The team deploys their bottom-up process that evaluates potential investments through 11 different factors, which are both quantitative and qualitative in nature and encompass three primary areas: company management, property factors, and equity characteristics. The team adjusts the weighting of these factors over time to reflect different market environments, which represents a sensible amount of flexibility in the investment process. Outputs receive deeper fundamental analysis, including meetings with company management. The result is a mildly concentrated portfolio with 40-60 names with an active share in the 65% to 75% range.

While the fund struggled in 2017, long-term performance has been solid. Since the fund's late 2011 inception, the fund has outperformed both its FTSE EPRA/NAREIT Developed benchmark and the Global Real Estate category average on both an absolute and risk-adjusted basis.

Add in competitive pricing and this fund is a solid option for investors looking for active management in the global real estate space.