Property industry innovator Iain Reid has bought a major stake in Indirex ahead of a planned expansion of the business.
The online portal for the private real estate funds market, launched by Propex founder Colin Barber and DTZ’s former head of derivatives Gary McNamara, will launch two new services in 2014, “bringing property funds into a new age”.
A data vault will provide a private platform for participating fund managers to communicate information to investors – rather than each firm having to set up and administer its own in-house service to field queries.
Reid said that this new data transfer service would “build increasing industry-wide effectiveness as its use becomes widespread by the community”.
The two-year old business also plans to aggregate and map public information on private real estate fund managers across the globe.
This is on top of its current provision of unlisted fund data, due diligence data suites and capital raisings analysis and a secondary trading area.
As part of the expansion strategy Indirex has also poached the IPD’s former group operations and IT director, Julian Self, who will join as innovation and technology director.
Reid joins around six other shareholders at Indirex as a “significant non-majority” owner, and will become chairman in due course.
The move unites Reid and Barber, who worked together at Richard Ellis where they created the UK’s first monthly property index. Reid was also instrumental in creating the UK derivatives market before moving into fund management and founding Protego.
