Mirvac Group has appointed Kit Georgeos as chief executive of funds management, promoting the manager of its largest wholesale office vehicle to run the whole institutional business and giving her a seat on the executive leadership team.
The company announced the appointment through its own newsroom. Georgeos reports to the group chief executive and managing director Campbell Hanan, and took up the role in the first week of this month. Mirvac is recruiting a replacement to run the wholesale office fund she has managed since twenty twenty three.
She brings more than twenty years in real estate investment, funds management and capital markets. Before joining Mirvac she was fund manager of the AMP Capital Wholesale Office Fund and deputy fund manager of the GPT Wholesale Office Fund, and she spent nine years in the real estate investment banking division of Macquarie Capital. She holds a bachelor of science and a bachelor of commerce from the University of Sydney.
The promotion is a statement about where Mirvac expects its growth to come from. Australian listed property groups have spent the past two years under pressure on their balance sheets, with higher funding costs and softer asset valuations making it expensive to hold development pipelines on their own books. The answer most of them have reached for is third party capital, which generates fee income without consuming balance sheet, and which has pushed funds management from a supporting business to a strategic one.
Appointing an office specialist to lead it is the more pointed detail. Australian office values have been the hardest hit of the major property sectors since the shift to hybrid working, and the wholesale office funds have been where institutional investors tested their patience. A manager who has run one of those vehicles through that period arrives with credibility on the asset class that is hardest to raise money against, which matters more than experience in the sectors that are already easy to sell.
The appointment follows a period in which Mirvac has reshaped its executive ranks under Hanan and has been explicit about wanting to grow funds under management. Georgeos now inherits that target, along with the task of persuading domestic and offshore institutions that Australian office has found a floor.
The wider context is a consolidation of who manages institutional property money in Australia. The retreat of several bank owned and insurer owned managers from direct real estate has left the listed groups as the natural home for mandates that were previously spread more widely, and Mirvac is one of a small number with the development capability to originate assets as well as manage them. That combination, originating product and then holding it in a fund for an institutional investor, is the model the group has said it wants to scale.
Georgeos takes the role at a point when the test is no longer whether the strategy is right but whether the money arrives.
