These are extraordinary times for us all, and first and foremost I hope this finds you safe and well.
Like most of our membership, AREF has moved to working remotely. Please be assured, we are all working hard to make this move as seamless as possible in the eyes of all our members. As challenging as current circumstances are, we will strive to continue as normal as possible.
Furthermore, I wanted to assure members that AREF continues to be here for everyone, to help you in any appropriate way that we can as an association.
Hopefully you will have seen my recent communication regarding material uncertainty in property valuations and fund suspensions, sent out to all members on the 18th March – a link to it can be found here.
Through AREF’s Retail Funds Committee, we have facilitated a broad discussion between the valuers and all the retail fund members. We also released a statement for the press, to clearly explain the reasons behind fund suspensions at this time. As you would expect, throughout we continued our engagement with the regulators and other industry bodies, to ensure a smooth and efficient flow of information and insight.
We recognise that the market conditions of course have ramifications beyond the daily-dealt, open-ended retail funds. To this end, we invited all the AREF institutional fund members to participate in an online meeting to discuss the potential implications for them and well over forty took part.
Following this initial meeting, it is clear there are two key areas AREF can best help. Firstly, we will continue to engage with the regulators, with the assistance of the Investment Association (IA), to seek guidance over how they expect property funds to act in the current challenging market conditions. Furthermore, given landlords are now understandably inundated with various requests from tenants, we shall closely liaise with other appropriate trade bodies and the Government with a view to safeguarding, pragmatically, the underlying investors, who are mostly pensioners.
Both the Retail Funds Committee and the working group for institutional funds will continue to meet at appropriate intervals.
We have also emailed all other AREF committees, to see if there is anything more we should be doing at this particular time to assist within their specific areas.
It has always been AREF’s role to bring the industry together to face the challenges presented to us, so we may collectively work a way through to the other side. Perhaps there has never been such a time since the association’s inception that we have all needed to do this more. Please feel free to contact us, should you think there is something AREF can help with.
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