AMP swimming happily in its small pond

Size certainly mattered to AMP Property Trust executive manager Rob Lang when he spoke at one of the world's largest real estate conferences last year.

European, American, Australian and Asian property fund chiefs gathered for the UBS Global Real Estate Conference in London in December.

There, Lang sat beside Richard Kincaid, head of Equities Office Properties Trust, the largest listed office block owner and manager in the US with 620 properties in 16 states.

"The theme of the conference was 'bigger is better' and obviously the AMP trust is a minnow on a global scale," said Lang, who met chiefs from the £6.2 billion ($16 billion) British landlord Liberty International, European real estate giant Klepierre and the US$13.9 billion ($20 billion) Brookfield Properties from the US.

"Yet I realised as they spoke that these people were small fish in a large pond," Lang said.

"The [AMP] trust is actually a big fish in a small pond, which has its advantages."

As New Zealand's largest office landlord, the AMP trust benefits from its influence on the market, the scale of its holdings and its ability to spot trends and move with them.

Tim Wheeler, chief executive of British industrial and warehouse landlord Brixton, said that large US real estate investment trusts outperformed their smaller equivalents consistently.

Of the 35 property trusts in the US worth US$5 billion, only five were diversified or mixed office and industrial.

Of the 16 British trusts worth US$10 billion, only one was not specialised.

The bigger the fish - and the more specialised that beast is - the more successful, it seems.