Aviva hands a CBRE IM veteran a 450,000-square-foot industrial pipeline

Aviva Investors has appointed George Richards as director, investment manager, with a mandate to scale its industrial and urban logistics real estate strategy, which the firm ranks alongside living and core office markets as one of three key investment areas.

Richards will oversee asset performance, co-investment activity, strategic partnerships, and leasing for a 450,000-square-foot pipeline that includes schemes developed with Bell Hammer at Catalyst Park in Birmingham, Hortus at Raynes Park in southwest London, and Slyfield Industrial Estate in Guildford.

He arrives from CBRE Investment Management, where he spent nine years as portfolio manager for a corporate pension scheme client and assistant fund manager for the CBRE U.K. Property Fund. For an insurance-owned manager, that background matters: pension fund portfolio management is a long-dated, liability-aware discipline, and Aviva's real estate equity book sits on its balance sheet. That structure gives Aviva a natural advantage in taking long-dated development risk, provided its underwriting stays disciplined.

The appointment follows a crowded late summer for both companies. Aviva completed its Mayfair office rehab with a Sona pre-let, a project that PRED reported ended up more than half pre-leased; CBRE IM, meanwhile, paid $135 million for a fully leased Charlotte industrial park from a Blackstone affiliate ahead of a 46.1-million-square-foot lease-expiration wave. Both were acquisitions of income-producing assets.

Richards's brief rests on a different proposition: build out and lease up a development pipeline, not simply buy stabilized assets. Aviva could have expressed its industrial conviction by deploying more capital into acquisitions, much as CBRE IM did with its Charlotte purchase, but instead it hired a manager whose mandate centers on development and lease-up. The bet is that origination will produce better economics than competing for existing buildings, and the three U.K. schemes are now the test.

The 450,000 square feet across those three schemes gives Richards a discrete underwriting record from the start, and if the leasing comes through, Aviva's industrial book will have a built-in supply advantage. The performance will determine whether development-led origination becomes a template for the firm's other real estate priorities.