Patrick Boocock Leaves CapitaLand Private Funds Team After Two Years

CapitaLand Investment announced late Friday that Patrick Boocock, the company’s chief executive officer for private equity alternative investments, left the company as of that day for personal reasons.

Now 50, Boocock, who spent nearly nine years with Brookfield Asset Management in Japan before joining CapitaLand in 2021, is said to be returning to Australia, with CapitaLand group chief operating officer Andrew Lim having been appointed as acting chief executive for the company’s private equity alternatives business.

During his time at CapitaLand, Boocock was responsible for developing the group’s private fund business in alternative sectors including private credit and real estate infrastructure – including data centres and social infrastructure.

Boocock had not yet responded to inquiries from Mingtiandi by the time of publication.

Private Fund Effort

Long Singapore’s biggest player in real estate investment trusts, CapitaLand had brought Boocock on board in October 2021, together with former BlackRock executive Simon Treacy, as part of a push to become a major player in private funds.

The company now manages S$29 billion ($21.7 billion) in funds across 30 private vehicles, according to its website. Counting both private and public funds, CapitaLand Investment now has S$133 billion in real estate assets under management, per company statements.

During Boocock’s time at CapitaLand, his team led the company’s establishment of a joint venture with Dutch pension fund manager APG to invest up to S$1.14 billion in the acquisition and expansion of self-storage operator Extra Space Asia.

That October 2022 deal saw the two giants commit an initial S$570 million in equity to acquire the Singapore-based mini-storage platform, which at the time owned, leased and operated 73 facilities across six Asian nations spanning over 1 million square feet (93,000 square metres) of space.

On the data centre side, Boocock worked to position the company to capitalise on a boom in demand fueled by the rise in AI, with the company in the process of establishing a platform capable of supporting hyperscale clients on a regional, or even global, level.

“Technologies are changing rapidly and those technologies may come out of the US, APAC or Europe, so having global best practices and boots on the ground in the major markets is quite important… Having that global connectivity, having fully integrated teams on the ground is highly helpful from our perspective,” Boocock said in an interview as part of Mingtiandi’s APAC Data Centre Forum in September of this year.

Stepping Up

Lim is taking over Boocock’s role after having been promoted to chief operating officer with CapitaLand Investment in January of this year. Prior to that upgrade, the University of Toronto graduate had served as group chief financial officer with the Temasek Holdings-backed company since 2016.

The finance expert also spent more than 12 years at HSBC in Singapore, where he worked his way up to managing director for global advisory with the banking titan.

Treacy remains in charge of CapitaLand Investment’s private fund business, with the company having raised S$368 million in a first closing for its second India business park development strategy in August.

In June of 2022 Treacy’s team established CapitaLand Investment’s first onshore renminbi fund in China with the RMB 700 million ($98 million) fund vehicle acquiring an office building in Shanghai.