He told the CIMMIT conference in Frankfurt in late January that the group has been net sellers for the last five years and sold around €3.5 billion in assets, much of it in the boom years 2006/7. It only began to focus comprehensively on real estate as an asset class in an August 2008 reorganisation that set up Allianz RE.

Unlike open-end funds, he told PIE on the sidelines, Allianz RE does not have to concern itself with liquidity considerations. Fund managers on the panel had illustrated that excessive demand from retail investors for real estate mutual funds had made management of liquidity difficult. Sudden liquidity loss has also sparked the highly controversial re-closure of open-end funds in the last few months.

"Allianz comes from a position of 4% allocation to real estate, this means practically from nowhere, and we want to go up to 6% or even 7%," Brendgen told the conference. "This creates our famous €10 billion to €13 billion in intended investment that we want to execute in the next three years."