Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operation Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Mike Carrier with UBS.
Mike Carrier - UBS
Just one question on the institutional side of the business, I think across the industry alliance institutions have kind of been sitting on their hands in terms of trying to figure out what they are going to do in terms of reallocating and re-waiting their asset mixed. It seems like your guys just picked up. I am just trying to get a sense versus the last six months when you are looking at new competition for new mandates and the amount of activity that you are seeing. Is that starting to pick up? And then I know you mentioned that there were a few wins that you have but they haven't been funded yet. Could you just go over what the amount was?
Robert Steers
Sure, Mike. It's Bob Steers. I think the activity on the institutional market for us has really being ramping up for three or four quarter now. It varies by investment strategy on the value side. As I think you're aware our team has top deciles performance one, three and five years. The fund -- the mutual fund got its three year track record and five-star Morningstar rating at the end of the summer. And so institutional activity has been extremely strong there really for 6 or 9 or 12 months.
But as you know it can take that long for searches to be completed and then funded. So on the value side, we -- this has all been brewing for a while. It continues to get stronger and stronger and we expect this year to be very strong and asset gathering for value.
Several other reasons besides our performance is the unusually bad performance of a number of value managers, a lot of value managers which here forward dominated both performance and asset gathering and we're seeing a significant amount of manager firings and we are in some cases winning mandates without even competing.
We're also seeing the manager risk issue favoring us both, particularly in value but also in other mandates where managers whose platforms are or parent companies are being spurn out, sold, divested, what have you or managers with leverage issues who have to cut back investment staff more than they otherwise would like to, that's troubling institutional investors.
So we are benefiting in value and also in real estate because of performance, because of stability of the platform, and there is lot of manager changes going on out there. That said we are also seeing new mandates. We are seeing them on a global basis. We are seeing mandates in Australia, Europe on the real estate side and we are also seeing a lot of platform activity with some of the larger financial institutions, the Fidelity, HSBC's and others are continuing to launch new programs but also eliminate managers who have been underperforming.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »



