NEW YORK CITY-KKR has completed fundraising for the $1.2-billion KKR Real Estate Partners Americas, a real estate fund that invests in North America and western Europe. Together with commitments from KKR personnel and KKR Financial Holdings LLC, the private equity firm's real estate platform has over $1.5 billion of committed capital for its strategy.

“We have a very deep and robust pipeline of opportunities,” Ralph Rosenberg, KKR's global head of real estate, told Bloomberg earlier this week. “It's harder to find things today than a year ago, but there is still a whole world of things to do with capital to help reposition assets.”

KKR began soliciting third-party capital for REPA, its first dedicated real estate fund, in the second quarter of 2013. “We believe the strong support from the market for the fundraise was due to the compelling nature of the opportunity and the power of the team,” says Suzanne Donohue, who heads the company's client and partner group. “We are very excited that we were able to attract new and existing KKR investors from leading public and private pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and family offices.”

Formed in 2011 and led by Rosenberg, KKR's global real estate team has 15 people in New York, London and Hong Kong. Starting with the first CRE investment in April of 2012, KKR has been investing actively, and had already warehoused a sizable portfolio of transactions on its balance sheet prior to forming REPA. 

Since launching the dedicated real estate platform in 2011, KKR has committed more than $850 million of equity to 14 real estate deals across the US and Europe. Among them are a housing development for oil workers in North Dakota, a portfolio of UK retail warehouses and the management business of Sunrise Senior Living Inc., which it acquired from Health Care REIT for about $130 million in September '12.

KKR says the fund will continue to target real estate opportunities, including property-level equity, debt, special situations transactions and businesses with significant real estate holdings.