He told the CIMMIT conference in Frankfurt in late January that the group has been net sellers for the last five years and sold around €3.5 billion in assets, much of it in the boom years 2006/7. It only began to focus comprehensively on real estate as an asset class in an August 2008 reorganisation that set up Allianz RE.

Unlike open-end funds, he told PIE on the sidelines, Allianz RE does not have to concern itself with liquidity considerations. Fund managers on the panel had illustrated that excessive demand from retail investors for real estate mutual funds had made management of liquidity difficult. Sudden liquidity loss has also sparked the highly controversial re-closure of open-end funds in the last few months.

"Allianz comes from a position of 4% allocation to real estate, this means practically from nowhere, and we want to go up to 6% or even 7%," Brendgen told the conference. "This creates our famous €10 billion to €13 billion in intended investment that we want to execute in the next three years."

The group is targeting between 8% and 10% internal rate of return on individual investments, and this can be a quite ambitious goal if yields are only around 4.5% for core assets, he said, taking into account the percentage that is taken up by administrative overheads.

"On the other hand, we at Allianz Real Estate are not in such bad shape because you have to consider that the lion's share of group assets is currently in bonds - not so many corporates but more state bonds that at the moment pay almost no real return. So this means that everything that Allianz Real Estate acquires at the moment is accretive for the portfolio."

"In total we have have invested €700 million in recent months because the French have spent some money, and we have done some indirect in the US," he said. "For the coming year we have an investment pipeline in theory that should move toward the region of €2 billion to €2.5 billion - pure equity, because debt financing is also too risky for us. Equity is fully available because we can take it out of sovereign bonds held by in group assets and invest it straight into real estate."