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The property division of one of Canada’s largest pension fund managers has pledged to lend more than £2.5bn to British data centres, housing and industrial buildings, in a big bet on the race to develop the UK’s digital infrastructure and address a chronic shortage of homes. 

QuadReal, which manages C$94bn (US$68bn) of real estate assets for British Columbia Investment Management, told the Financial Times it was launching a lending business in the UK that would commit the debt in the next three to five years, before expanding further into Europe. 

The move comes after US tech groups including Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and OpenAI pledged to invest tens of billions of pounds to build computing infrastructure in the UK during Donald Trump’s state visit to the country this week. 

“If you look at the data centre space, there is not enough capital around right now to suck up what’s being built,” said Jonathan Dubois-Phillips, president for international real estate at QuadReal Property Group. “The scale of it is massive . . . there’s a huge demand for debt there”. 

He added that QuadReal, which operates independently from BCI, was well positioned because it was not a regulated bank and could be “very nimble” since it is not constrained by loan to value ratios in the way some banks are.  

QuadReal is already a big investor in British property, with almost C$8bn of equity investment spanning 8,500 residential units and 4,500 student beds across 29 communities in the UK. Moving into the debt side was a natural evolution of the business, which already has C$7.3bn in US investments, Dubois-Phillips said.

He added that housing was a “big focus” of QuadReal, noting a “chronic undersupply” in the UK that made it “very expensive”, and that there was particular demand for “properly and professionally run” apartment buildings in the UK that are corporately owned. 

“We really put our money where our mouth is in terms of believing in UK housing issues,” he said, noting that the UK currently represents 15 per cent of QuadReal’s global portfolio, a proportion that could rise to 20 per cent across debt and equity within the next five years.  

Big investors including global private equity firms and pension funds have been ploughing money into UK housing, betting that a shortage of supply will boost rental growth.

BCI established QuadReal as a fully owned, independently run company in 2016 to manage its clients’ real estate assets, which currently represent almost a quarter of BCI’s C$300bn global portfolio.

QuadReal this week announced it had bought the residential brand and operating platform of real estate fund manager Realstar to expand its build-to-rent and student housing portfolio. In July it announced it had bought a £500mn, 3,500-bed UK student housing portfolio from Apollo. 

The business’s pledge comes as the government tries to push British pension funds to invest more in domestic private markets, including property. Dubois-Phillips said that while the property group had not yet made any investments alongside British pension funds, he was “100 per cent open to it . . . we just haven’t really met them”.