Steve Reents

Over the last year and a half, Steve Reents has found his footing in his new role as deputy U.S. head and U.S. chief investment officer at BGO, where he is responsible for leading the firm’s domestic investments team. 

He’s had a decades-long career with the firm, starting out on the asset management side of the business — or, as he quipped, “I started in 2003 with the Bentall Kennedy side, so the B side, not the GO side.” Over the years has risen to various leadership roles after moving over to the investment portion of the company. 

In his current role, Reents has taken on the chief investment officer title, and it’s up to him and another colleague to run BGO’s U.S. investment platform. That platform over the last year has invested heavily in the logistics space, health care real estate and multifamily, with some $7.1 billion in total investment.

“We invest across core, core-plus, value-add. We have discretionary capital in an open-ended core fund,” he said. “We have a handful of sector-specific value-add strategies, closed-end value-add strategies, and then we have some separate account mandates, including a very large [separately managed account] with CalPERS.” (CalPERS is California’s Public Employees Retirement System.)

BGO’s U.S. business represents about $40 billion of the firm’s $100 billion in assets under management. 

Earlier this year, BGO parent company Sun Life Financial acquired Bell Partners, a $10 billion vertically integrated property management and development firm, for $350 million, with the intention of integrating the platforms in an effort to strengthen BGO’s position within commercial real estate, particularly multifamily. 

“We’re in the process of merging the Bell platform into our operation,” Reents said. “We think of that combination as allowing Bell and that leadership team to effectively be our housing division, where they will deploy capital into all things housing for us.”