Casper Hesp

This article was written when Casper was INREV's Senior Research Manager, seconded to ANREV in Hong Kong. Casper is now  INREV's Director Research & Market Information in Amsterdam.

Hong Kong’s hilly terrain is not the first place that you would expect a Dutch man to feel at home but Casper Hesp is one flatlander who enjoyed his time in this high-energy Asian city.

Casper, INREV’s Senior Research Manager (now Director Research and Market Information, since May 2012), was five months into a seven month secondment to ANREV, INREV’s sister organisation. His role was primarily to develop a performance index for the region but he was also on hand to offer ANREV the benefit of his experience after five years as the mainstay of the research team at INREV.

I arrived at INREV as a student and the office was small so my desk faced a wall. In some ways, being at ANREV is a similar start with the same tiny office and small enthusiastic team, just with a slightly better view from my desk.

At the time he was studying for his Master’s Degree in Finance and Investments, from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He remained a part-time student while completing his VBA, the Dutch equivalent of the CFA, with a thesis on the impact of fund structure on non-listed property fund performance.

Casper was a natural fit for the secondment having been integral in the development of the INREV Index, which has grown from 73 funds to 269, the majority of which now provide information to members on a quarterly basis. “The start was difficult in Europe as we were persuading fund managers to give us information when there was nothing to show what we were going to do with it. Now, this experience makes the starting point in Asia easier. We can use the European results as a selling point to show what is possible in the future and that has been very influential here in Asia,” he explains.

On top of the usual hard work and persistence to persuade fund managers to contribute, he is also contending with a much larger basket of currencies and a market composition that sees the opportunity fund segment as large as the core segment. It is, however, these challenges that he sees driving the appetite for the index in the region. “The Asian market is so much more diverse with greater differences between those markets which are developed and those which are emerging. Investors coming into this market want to be able to understand those differences properly within the context of a regional index.”

The high number of opportunity funds in the region also presented Casper with a chance to explore the development of an index for this part of the market, the results of which will also support INREV’s ambitions to cover this segment in Europe.

Casper’s last few days in the region involved a stop in Singapore for the launch of the index at the ANREV Annual Conference before heading home to Dortrecht near Rotterdam. Back to a one-hour train journey to the INREV office rather than a stroll 20 minutes down the world’s longest escalator system to work but also, he points out, back to supporting (and suffering with) Feyenoord, his beloved football team.