Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, Oak Brook, committed an additional $70 million to AEW Core Property Trust (U.S.), managed by AEW Capital Management, and an additional $30 million to Invesco Core Real Estate (USA).
With the additions, the $34.9 billion pension fund will have a total of $195 million in the AEW fund and $130 million in the Invesco fund.
The move is being made to meet IMRF's core policy target, which is a minimum 50% of the pension fund's real estate allocation, said Dhvani Shah, chief investment officer. The commitments bring the allocation to 58% in core and the rest in non-core.
Its overall real estate allocation is an actual 4.1% of total assets, below its 8% target.
Separately, the IMRF board approved changing its U.S. equity benchmark to the Russell 3000 index, replacing the Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market index. IMRF already uses Russell indexes for its other U.S. equity subasset-class benchmarks; the pension fund wants to have Russell indexes for all equity benchmarking, Ms. Shah said.
