CBRE has appointed the leader of one of Canada's largest pension funds and former head of the brokerage's business in that country to its board.
CBRE said Blake Hutcheson, who serves as president and CEO of the Ontario Municipal Employees' Retirement System, or OMERS, will join its board Sept. 1. Hutcheson is to serve as a director until CBRE's 2023 annual meeting of shareholders, at which time he would stand for reelection.
Hutcheson's appointment expands Dallas-based CBRE’s board to 11 directors. CBRE is the world's largest commercial real estate brokerage based on revenue.
“I am thrilled to be re-joining CBRE, a company I know intimately both as a client and longtime employee," Hutcheson said in a statement. "CBRE is well positioned strategically and operationally to thrive across market cycles."
In Hutcheson, CBRE adds a director with extensive experience in institutional investment and commercial real estate. He's also an athlete who plays Ontario Masters Lacrosse every summer for his hometown of Huntsville, Ontario, according to his OMERS biography.
In 2018, OMERS appointed Hutcheson as president and chief pension officer. He took over as CEO in 2020. He previously had served as president, CEO and chief investment officer of Oxford Properties Group, OMERS’s real estate investment subsidiary that has property investments across the globe.
Prior to working for Oxford and OMERS, Hutcheson served as head of global real estate at Mount Kellett Capital Management, a New York-based private equity firm. Before that, he was chairman and president of Canadian, Latin American and Mexican operations for CBRE, then known as CB Richard Ellis.
“Our Board will benefit enormously from his varied experience as a real estate investor and operator," CBRE Board Chairman Brandon Boze said in a statement.
In 2021, CBRE's nonemployee directors received a compensation package that included a $100,000 annual cash retainer, in U.S. currency, paid in full upon commencement of their service on the board, according to CBRE's 2022 proxy statement. They also got a restricted stock grant valued at US$200,000 on the date of the annual meeting, and that vested at either the one-year anniversary of the grant or the next annual meeting, depending on which one comes first, according to the proxy.
As president and CEO of Toronto-based OMERS — which has CA$119.5 billion, or more than US$92 billion, in net assets — Hutcheson oversees a pension fund where real estate assets account for 17% of its investment portfolio, according to OMERS' 2022 midyear investment update.
The pension funds real estate investments had a net return of 9.9% for the first six months of the year and were part of a group of asset classes that "largely offset the negative performance of public equities and credit investments," Jonathan Simmons, OMERS' chief financial and strategy officer, said in the report.