Savills IM wins Bank of Italy nod for Italian direct lending

Savills Investment Management SGR has Bank of Italy authorization to extend its operations to managing Italian alternative investment funds focused on direct lending, an entry into the country's real estate debt market that the firm will run entirely separately from its pan-European debt strategy, Savills IM DRC.

The separation is the part worth reading into, because the Italian equity business is large enough to matter on its own. Savills IM SGR manages €7.6 billion ($8.2 billion) of real estate through equity strategies, just under 30 percent of the group's €25.5 billion ($27.5 billion), and completed more than €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) of new acquisitions in FY2025 while putting €200 million ($216 million) into refurbishment and repositioning; the first half of 2026 added €360 million ($388.8 million) of acquisitions and €170 million ($183.6 million) of disposals. The lending platform will fund Italian borrowers with a focus on income-producing assets owned by institutional capital, the same collateral the equity book has been buying, refitting and selling.

The argument for a standalone vehicle follows from that overlap. A manager already transacting with Italian institutional owners does not need a pan-European debt fund's scale to originate loans; it needs a wrapper Italian institutions can subscribe to, and an onshore AIF likely is that wrapper in a way a feeder into a cross-border strategy is not.

Giovanni Trespidi, at Savills IM since 2021, will lead the platform with more than 11 years in Italian real estate lending and AIF management. The profile covers both halves of a vehicle in its capital-raising years, when construction and institutional onboarding matter as much as underwriting.

The refinancing wall is a duration transfer from banks to private credit, and the vehicles that own the next leg will be those that can hold a maturity. Italy adds a second gate to that trade in the onshore AIF wrapper, and the two gates do not open on the same schedule; the next marker is a domestic institutional close.

The practical question is whether the two books stay separate. A lender that has owned and repositioned the building next door holds better information on the collateral than one that only sees a loan tape, and the temptation to co-invest across the equity and debt platforms will be the thing to watch.