LaSalle ready for U.S. commercial property deals

NEW YORK (Reuters) - LaSalle Investment Management has about $1.5 billion to $2 billion ready to use to buy U.S. commercial property for its investors but does not expect to pull the trigger for a few quarters.

"We're very interested in the U.S.," Jacques Gordon, global strategist and head of Research for LaSalle Investment Management, told the Reuters Global Real Estate Summit on Monday. "We have dry powder. We'll bid on them when sellers meet our price and that hasn't happened yet."

That could come as early as the second or third quarter of next year, he said, "But no one really knows."

For that to change and for transactions to ramp up, lenders would have to accept that the price of private equity has fallen below their debt.

"That does involve in many cases taking a hit on their balance sheet to the debt," Gordon said.

U.S. commercial real estate values have fallen 20 percent from their peak, according to the NCREIF (National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries) Property Index. LaSalle Investment Management expects them to fall another 20 percent to 25 percent, Gordon said.

For core investment, which includes properties that have a stable cash flow from rents and occupancies, the private equity arm of Chicago-based real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL.N) has as much as a half billion to $1 billion to invest in stable core U.S. properties.

For value-added properties, which targets properties that need some work before they are brought up to the more stable core level, LaSalle Investment Management has about $500 million of which 20 percent is committed. That could be leveraged to $1 billion worth of buying power for U.S. value-added property investment.

The company has $40 billion under management worldwide.

(For summit blog: blogs.reuters.com/summits/)

(Reporting by Ilaina Jonas; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)