Sean Bannon

Sean Bannon has approximately 30 years of experience founding, building, and leading commercial real estate investment businesses in the United States. Based in New York, he is currently responsible for Zurich’s US Real Estate investment businesses with roughly $3 billion in AUM across Zurich balance sheet and third-party investor fund portfolios. Mr. Bannon is a voting member of the Global Real Estate Investment Committee at Zurich, with over $15 billion of AUM, and is also a voting member of the Investment Committee of ZAAM, LLC, the firm’s global alternative investment unit dedicated to Hedge Fund, Private Equity and US Real Estate investment with aggregate alternative investment AUM exceeding $20 billion.

Mr. Bannon joined Zurich in 1997 to help found the firm’s US direct real estate acquisition platform, focusing on high grade credit tenants, and acquired approximately $2.5 billion of assets through structured finance transactions. In 2004, he helped launch the fund of funds program, and invested nearly $1 billion in 40 real estate funds, co-investments and joint ventures. In 2012, Mr. Bannon authored the current USRE investment strategy, and hired a team of professionals to execute a core, direct acquisition program across four product types and 20 US markets, which has now invested over $2.5 billion across select Zurich balance sheets. Most recently, he launched the firm’s first dedicated third-party core real estate investment fund for foreign investors, and is currently investing roughly $500 million of initial equity in core, direct opportunities throughout the US.

Prior to joining Zurich, Mr. Bannon held various real estate positions with Lehman Brothers and Arthur Andersen. Mr. Bannon holds a BS in Accounting and Computer Information Systems from Fairfield University, and a Masters of Business Administration degree from Columbia Business School.

Zurich Alternative Asset Management, LLC (“ZAAM’) is the alternative investment advisor for balance sheets of Zurich Insurance Group, a global, leading multi-line insurer with $333 billion of total investments as of December 31, 2021. ZAAM invests in hedge fund, private equity and US real estate investments on behalf of Zurich’s balance sheet and third party clients. The US real estate business is a national core and core-plus acquisition program run out of New York which targets office, retail, industrial and multi-family properties in 20 markets across the United States, and has directly acquired over $2.5 billion of assets into this program. ZAAM has also repositioned and restructured non-core, value-added and opportunistic assets of more than $2 billion. ZAAM recently launched an open-ended third-party US real estate fund with initial investing capacity approximating $500 million for international investors in core and core plus assets, and continues to add to its balance sheet portfolio under management.