The Reserved Investor Fund (RIF), a new UK-domiciled model for alternative investment vehicles, is expected to open the door to cheap onshoring of real estate funds in the United Kingdom.

UK-based investment managers will now be able to avoid going offshore to register their funds, should they choose to do so. The RIF is exempt from certain taxes and enables managers to circumvent having to deal with multiple legal, tax and regulatory regimes when operating funds.

The structure of the RIF has been designed by Melville Rodrigues, a lawyer who is head of real assets advisory at Apex Group and a member of the Association of Real Estate Funds (AREF) public policy committee in the United Kingdom. It has been created with commercial property, housing, social infrastructure, and other essential assets in mind. Allowing quarterly redemptions, it is flexible enough to enable a wide range of institutional investors to allocate to it. AREF says RIFs offer a speedy, flexible and c