As more institutional investors seek specialized managers with deep sourcing capabilities, an emerging manager with less than $1 billion in assets is attracting an influx of capital to target real estate credit opportunities in Europe’s lower and middle markets.
After receiving seed capital from GCM Grosvenor and some U.S. pensions last fall, Zenzic Capital has received a $100 million commitment from Stable Asset Management for its evergreen real estate credit opportunities fund. This is Stable Asset Management’s first to Zenzic and the largest single LP commitment its fund has received.
Founded in 2014 by Nadine Buckland and Tom Lloyd-Jones, the $450 million Zenzic focuses on inefficient and underserved segments of lower middle market European real estate and asset-backed credit markets. The firm partners with sponsors, real estate groups, and corporates to deliver customized financing solutions.
The firm's evergreen fund, launched in October, provides institutions access to diversified credit investments, including short-duration high-yield tactical opportunities, medium-term asset improvement financings, and capital solutions across the capital structure. The strategy targets market dislocations and structural inefficiencies.
“We take a broader view of credit than many traditional private credit managers,” Lloyd-Jones told Institutional Investor. “We can invest across the full spectrum of private credit opportunities, from senior secured debt through subordinated debt, structured credit, preferred equity, and everything in between.”
For closed-end private credit funds, capital effectively has a single use, so managers must often choose between calculating performance as an internal rate of return or as a multiple of invested capital. A short-duration credit fund could generate an excellent IRR because capital was returned quickly, but the MOIC would likely appear less compelling because the investment has less time to compound.
The fund’s evergreen nature allows Zenzic to write short-term credits (e.g. 30 months or less) without having to pick between IRR and MOIC. Capital can be recycled as investments are repaid, so Zenzic can invest in compelling short-term credits, realize returns, then redeploy that capital into new opportunities.
“Over time, the repeated reinvestment allows us to capture both the strong IRRs associated with shorter-duration investments and the attractive MOICs that come from multiple cycles of value creation,” Lloyd-Jones added.
When Zenzic launched the evergreen strategy in September 2025, it aimed for a $2 billion hard cap. According to Buckland, that is still the goal.
“We have a very significant executable pipeline built because the firm has been operating in this space for over a decade, and the ambition for us now is to deploy well and continue to raise capital,” she added.
But no matter how they scale, Buckland said they have “no appetite for scope creep.” Zenzic's commitment is to those parts of the lower middle markets; they won’t be doing deal sizes materially above what they're committing now (“The scaling will be granular,” she said).
“We very much want to scale up where we see the fish are fat, but not many people fishing in those waters.”
More partnerships between large investors like Stable Asset Management and smaller emerging managers like Zenzic are forming as more large institutions look beyond firms like BlackRock and Apollo to access inefficient markets through niche or emerging managers. CalSTRS, for example, recently partnered with emerging manager specialist ABS Global to find managers not on anyone’s radar.
