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Global Real Estate Value

Objective

Third Avenue's Global Real Estate Value strategy seeks to achieve absolute returns over the long term, while minimizing investment risk, by investing predominantly in international real estate and real estate-related securities. The portfolio's foreign exposure will be a minimum of 65%.

Investment Philosophy

We believe that capital appreciation in our portfolios is best achieved by identifying safe companies that are cheaply priced.

Investment Approach

Third Avenue's global real estate portfolios seek to capitalize on applying the firm's disciplined, bottom-up, value approach to identify suitable real estate securities worldwide. The strategy invests opportunistically, paying little regard to market capitalization, sector, country or other benchmark oriented criteria. Portfolios tend to be more heavily invested in REOCs rather than in REITs. In keeping with Third Avenue's belief that diversification is a poor surrogate for knowledge, price consciousness and control, portfolios are relatively concentrated.

Third Avenue has a team of four dedicated real estate investment professionals, who are assisted by the entire Third Avenue investment team. Our team of investment professionals analyzes companies from the bottom-up in order to identify securities that we believe are safe and cheaply priced. Fundamental research is the foundation of our process, with a focus on balance sheet analysis. We define "safe" to mean the issuer is well-capitalized with a strong balance sheet and high quality assets. The company should not have significant liabilities, whether on or off the balance sheet. The issuer should be run by a competent management team and management's interests should be aligned with those of its shareholders. Finally, the company must be engaged in a business that we understand, with reliable financial disclosures readily available to serve as objective benchmarks and help us evaluate the business, its values and dynamics. We consider an investment to be "cheap" if the security can be obtained at a market price substantially below a conservative valuation of the business as a private entity or takeover candidate.

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