Savills Investment Management SGR has entered the Italian real estate debt market after receiving authorisation from the Bank of Italy to extend its operations to the management of Italian alternative investment funds (AIFs) focused on direct lending.
The Italian arm of the €25.5bn (AUM) investment manager will offer institutional investors access to a range of direct lending solutions funding Italian borrowers, with the suite of products having a focus on income-producing assets owned by institutional capital.
The new offering will be led by Giovanni Trespidi, who has been with Savills IM since 2021 and brings over 11 years of experience in the Italian real estate lending market and management of real estate AIFs. The Italian platform is entirely separate from Savills IM’s European debt strategy, Savills IM DRC.
Savills IM SGR already manages €7.6bn of real estate assets through equity strategies, and the launch of the new platform follows a period of consistent growth for the company. In FY 2025, Savills IM SGR completed over €1.2bn in new acquisitions and invested €200mn in capex for refurbishment and repositioning initiatives, followed by €360mn of acquisitions and €170mn of disposals in H1 2026.
The firm’s diversified equity portfolio – which manages assets on behalf of approximately 20 of the world’s leading institutional investors through real estate funds and SICAFs – is invested across retail, with a specific focus on food retail assets operated by leading Italian and international grocery chains, industrial and logistics, where Savills IM SGR has a wall of dry powder to deploy into a range of assets including sale-and-leaseback transactions, office, with an exclusive focus on the delivery of Grade A assets in Milan and Rome, and living, which prioritises the development of Build-to-Rent, Build-to-Sell and PBSA, for which several investment initiatives are currently under construction in the main Italian cities.
