BlackRock Boosts Real Estate Team

Wendy Spires

9 July 2012

BlackRock, the US asset management giant, has bolstered its real estate team with the addition of managing director Justin Brown.

Brown’s new role will see him based in London managing the firm’s £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion) BlackRock UK Property Fund alongside Marcus Sperber, head of the firm’s international real estate team.

Brown was latterly an executive director within the global real estate team at UBS Global Asset Management, where he had been manager of the £1 billion UBS Triton Property Fund since March 2010. In his prior career he worked for La Salle Investment Management.

In other recent hires, last month BlackRock appointed Dr Philipp Hildebrand, the Swiss central banker who resigned after a currency trading scandal involving his wife, as vice chairman.

Dr Hildebrand will join the asset management titan in October to oversee its largest institutional client relationships in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. He will be based in London and report directly to Laurence Fink, BlackRock’s chairman and chief executive.

Dr Hildebrand has worked in asset management and banking for nearly two decades, most recently as chairman of the Swiss National Bank since January 2010.

He resigned in January this year after details emerged about his wife’s currency trading activities just weeks before a key foreign exchange policy announcement. Dr Hildebrand's wife Kashya, a former hedge fund trader who now runs a Zurich art gallery, bought SFr400,000 of dollars on 15 August, three weeks before her husband oversaw moves to curb the Swiss franc’s ascendancy, as this was harming Swiss exporters. She later sold the dollars at a higher rate.

“The fact is: my word is my bond,” Dr Hildebrand said when resigning. “I had no knowledge of my wife’s transaction on that day. Unfortunately, mistakes were made in connection with these transactions.”

Before joining SNB, Dr Hildebrand was at Union Bancaire Privée in Geneva from 2001 until 2003, where he held the positions of chief investment officer and member of the executive board. Before that, he was CIO of the Vontobel Group in Zurich and a partner at Moore Capital Management in London and New York. His professional career started in 1994 at the World Economic Forum.