BT property team under pressure as another departs

BT/Sagitta property analyst Damien Barrack has left the group less than two weeks after the departure of listed property director Carlos Cocaro.

Barrack’s departure left the only one member of the original team, Antoinette Plater, in charge of the division, and on her own until mid last week.

Plater, who has 18 years experience in her sector, had been acting as head of listed property trusts but has since been officially appointed to the position.

A replacement analyst, Antony Knep, has since come to Plater’s aid, joining the group last Wednesday. A BT spokesperson says a third analyst is also currently being recruited.

Knep, with 13 years experience in the analysis of direct and listed property trusts, joins BT from Burdett Buckeridge Young, where he was an institutional dealer responsible for the sales and trading of LPTs.

As such, InvestorWeb has retained its ‘Investment Grade’ rating for BT/Sagitta's LPT capabilities.However the team will be under pressure, with InvestorWeb noting that risk adjusted returns have been “consistently poor for some time, so there will be a high level of pressure on Plater and Knep to address this”.

However, a spokesperson for BT says that the fund has been experiencing above benchmark returns for some time.

The group states that over the short term, active returns over the last month (to March 2003), were 2.08 per cent, for the quarter to the end of the same period were 1.19 per cent, and over the last six months were 1.99 per cent (all gross of fees and tax).

While the research house also says “it will be difficult to turn performance around in the immediate future while the team settles in to their new roles”, BT says that the above figures really show that the team hasn’t wavered, and has been hitting some early runs.

Last month, van Eyk research group placed BT/Sagitta’s listed property funds on a ‘Hold’ rating in response to Cocaro’s resignation.

At the time InvestorWeb also downgraded the rating of BT/Sagitta’s listed property team from ‘Exceptional Buy’ to ‘Strong Buy’ as a result of the initial departure. However the downgrade did not affect the BT/Sagitta’s overall ‘Investment Grade’ rating in the listed property sector.