Callan Associates

Alternative Investment Services

Our Alternatives Research Group conducts research on alternative investment strategies and serves as a resource for our clients that are interested in developing or maintaining their alternative investment program.  Our experts in the fields of Real Estate, Private Equity, and Hedge Funds assist our clients with strategic planning, policy development, implementation, and portfolio monitoring.

Real Estate

Callan has provided real estate consulting services since the late 1970s and actively monitors more than 120 real estate investment managers.  Our proprietary real estate performance database is comprised of 460 products representing more than $220 billion of institutional capital.

Real Estate Consulting Services include:

Strategic Planning

• Development of guidelines, policies, and procedures
• Review of current real estate portfolio managers

Plan Implementation

• Manager evaluations
• Manager searches
• Annual planning meetings
• Separate account tactical plans

Performance Evaluation and Manager Monitoring

• Annual manager review
• Quarterly performance measurement
• On-site manager visits

Continuing Education

• Client-directed research
• Research papers

Private Equity

Callan’s Private Markets Group has provided full service private equity consulting since 1991.  Its spectrum of services includes program design, implementation, and monitoring of private equity programs.

• Review existing portfolio’s diversification by strategy, industry, and geographic exposure.
• Develop policies and procedures by documenting scope of the program, return/risk expectations, eligible investment strategies, diversification parameters, performance monitoring criteria, and respective roles and responsibilities for all parties.
• Derive short-term tactical plan with goals and objectives for the next twelve months, including a review of the current status of the portfolio and recent and prospective market conditions.
• Identify attractive partnership investments using Callan’s proprietary database of offerings and partnerships.  Callan consultants also hold more than 100 meetings annually with private equity managers to supplement the database information.  Manager selection due diligence adheres to a well-defined process:
  1. Hold an initial meeting to gather preliminary information.
  2. Review written responses to a detailed questionnaire that includes historical track record information.
  3. Visit manager on-site to discuss investment decision process and gather more detailed organizational information.
  4. Phone references to gain perspectives of other parties who have been involved with the manager.
  5. Draft an investment memorandum to cover key aspects of the evaluation.
  6. Conduct interviews if requested by client.
• Implement the plan and monitor performance.  Clients receive quarterly performance measurement reports with both financial information and portfolio company information.

Hedge Fund Consulting Services

Callan has been conducting dedicated hedge fund research for over ten years.  We assist our clients with all phases of hedge fund investing, including strategic planning, implementation, monitoring, and education.

Philosophy

We believe that a hedge fund manager should complement existing asset class managers and should be viewed as a diversifying and non-correlating addition to the equity or fixed income assets.

Services - Callan’s comprehensive services are designed to incorporate individual client needs and risk to return tolerances.

• Develop investment policy and guidelines
• Establish objective for the Plan
• Review the use of fund-of-funds versus direct strategies
• Decide number and types of managers needed
• Design the manager structure
• Conduct the manager search

Research

Callan’s dedicated Hedge Fund Research group is the front line for understanding the market and the managers.

We conduct over 200 meetings (both in-house and on-site) per year with managers of hedge fund-of-funds and those individual hedge funds in which our fund sponsor clients have a particular interest.

Hedge Fund Database

Our hedge fund database statistics include approximately 270 fund-of-funds, covering more than 165 managers.  We also subscribe to outside services to supplement our internal data.