Institutional investors targeting property investment in Latin America have many more choices than they did just a decade ago. There has been an increase in U.S., Canadian and European institutional investors looking at the region, and a concomitant increase in the number of vehicles and the types of products available.

“Latin America was not on the radar screen of most institutional investors until recently — the last few years — and as a result, there were few real estate private equity firms doing business in Latin America,” says James Worms, chairman and CEO of Paladin Realty Partners, which has raised a series of closed-end real estate funds targeting Latin America. “Further limiting investor and manager interest was the small deal size, the development nature of the business, the lack of debt financing with which to leverage returns and, finally, attractive competing opportunities elsewhere.”

Worms notes that i