Pedro Furtado Reis (left) and Daniel Balthasar.
Pedro Furtado Reis and Daniel Balthasar
Co-chief investment officers for active strategies at Norges Bank Investment Management
Norges Bank is the central bank of Norway and the world’s top sovereign wealth fund, with $1.91 trillion in assets, according to the bank. Founded in 1990, Norges manages the country’s global Government Pension Fund and the bank’s own foreign exchange reserves.
Its Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) has real estate holdings valued at $35.51 billion in U.S. currency, consisting of 910 properties in 14 countries, according to its website.
In New York, this includes 45 percent investments in BXP’s 343 Madison Avenue, 7 Times Square and 601 Lexington Avenue; a 49.9 percent investment in Nuveen Real Estate’s 2 Herald Square; and a 45 percent investment in PGIM Real Estate and SJP’s 11 Times Square, to name a few.
The bank’s pension fund reported a 4.8 percent return on real estate investments in 2024, according to NBIM’s annual report for the year, and put those investments at around $69.86 billion, which made up 3.7 percent of the fund.
Pedro Furtado Reis and Daniel Balthasar joined Norges in 2011 and 2006, respectively. Both began as portfolio managers and rose through the ranks until being named co-chiefs in July 2022. In May 2024, Reis and Balthasar accepted the Fund of the Year 2023 award from data platform Global SWF.
Norges made news on the real estate front in June 2025 with the hiring of Alexander Knapp, Hines’ chief investment officer for Europe, as its new global head of real estate.
The bank’s Monetary Policy and Financial Stability Committee surprised global economists this June when it unanimously decided to lower Norway’s benchmark interest rate from 4.5 percent to 4.25 percent, with an eye toward hopefully reducing the borrowing benchmark again this year.
“Inflation has declined since the monetary policy meeting in March, and the inflation outlook for the coming year indicates lower inflation than previously expected,” the Norwegian bank’s governor, Ida Wolden Bache, said in a release. “A cautious normalization of the policy rate will pave the way for inflation to return to target without restricting the economy more than necessary.”
