Chad Tredway

“The vision for our group is to position our portfolios for outsized returns for our investors. That’s our true North, and that’s what I’ve been focused on since I landed here two and a half years ago,” Chad Tredway said.

While orienteering along the Earth’s rotational axis, two themes are firmly at play for J.P. Morgan Asset Management (JPMAM) within its $80 billion portfolio.

One is select capital deployment. 

“We’re not taking a broad-based approach to the market just for broad market exposure. We’re back to basics and leaning in on fundamentals around supply and demand. Our access at J.P. Morgan becomes the clients’ access, and we’re able to use all our data to determine where the highest demand will be for real estate, and we’re focused on niche categories,” Tredway said. “In the past you didn’t have to do this. But today — in order to win — you need to be focused on niche, high-
demand real estate.” 

Secondly, unlike many, “We’ve never assumed rates are going to go down. We’ve been focused on long-term cash flow growth, which is why demand for real estate matters so much and, because the economy continues to do well, it gives us much more resilience for our clients, better returns and lower risk.” 

Indeed, the platform plays in many niche sectors that are gaining traction from a wider set of investors, but Tredway isn’t concerned. 

“We expect to have competition in the asset classes where we play, but we are a first mover in industrial outdoor storage (IOS), net lease and advanced manufacturing, and that gives us two big things: experience and scale,” he said. “We’ve been investing in IOS for over a decade, we were one of the first investors to do it, and we got there before institutions did. We have a $4 billion portfolio, one of the largest in the industry, and an ecosystem which started with the work we did with Alterra [IOS]. We now own a piece of Zenith [IOS] and are able to leverage all of our experience and the 36,000 middle market clients that we bank, which is amazing. We’ve the No. 1 market share in middle market clients that utilize IOS.”

Office in New York and San Francisco has also been a strong performer for the platform this past year and — with a 30 million-square-foot office portfolio — it has a pretty expert view. “The market is back. We also continue to see the consumer and businesses be strong and healthy, and that’s leading to rent growth from office to our retail portfolio,” Tredway said. “There’s always an inflection point in the cycle when we start to see investors come back in — and that’s where we are today.”