NEW YORK CITY—Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing said Wednesday it had raised $1.7 billion toward its latest direct investment fund, North Haven Real Estate Fund VIII Global and related co-investment vehicles. G8 has already closed on deals in the UK, Austria, Japan and Australia as well as domestically.

“Our partners in G8 are a sophisticated group of public and private pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, family offices and individuals from around the world,” says John Klopp, co-CEO and co-CIO at MSREI. “We will apply the same philosophy and patient, disciplined approach to investing their capital that we do across all of our strategies.” Adds Olivier de Poulpiquet, who shares CEO and CIO duties with Klopp, “G8's flexible, global mandate allows us to look across all of our markets and select those opportunities which we believe offer the best risk-adjusted returns.”

In SEC filings, MSREI doesn't identify a fundraising target for G8, which was launched in 2013. The fund's predecessor, Morgan Stanley Real Estate VII Global, closed at $4.7 billion in March 2010.

North Haven is the closed-end fund family of Morgan Stanley Merchant Banking & Real Estate Investing, the direct private investing business of Morgan Stanley. This past April, Morgan Stanley changed the names of its private investment funds in accordance with a Volcker Act requirement that banks not include their own name in the titles of these funds. The investment bank chose the moniker North Haven, after the Maine community where its original partners met and founded the company in 1935.