TREF IV raised $163m and is over 70% deployed.
A slew of billionaires and private equity veterans have come together to help Beverly Hills, California-based manager Tryperion Holdings close its fourth special situations fund on $163 million in commitments, PERE can reveal.
Tryperion RE Fund IV, which more than doubled the $67 million raised for its predecessor in 2018, scored backing from Ares Management and Apollo Global Management co-founder Antony Ressler, Oaktree Capital co-chairman Howard Marks and Ken Moelis, chief executive of investment bank Moelis & Company. Newcomers to the fund series, which accounted for one-third of the investor base, include Andrew and Peggy Cherng, billionaire founders of the restaurant chain Panda Express, as well as a major university endowment.
Tryperion founder Jeffrey Karsh attributed investor interest to the series’ past performance and to its sub-institutional strategy, which allows the firm to target investments too small for larger managers. Prior to founding Tryperion in 2013, which now has $2 billion in assets under management, Karsh worked in acquisitions at Los Angeles-based hedge fund Canyon Partners. He is the son of Oaktree co-founder Bruce Karsh.
“When you get to the size of a mega-fund… they’re all looking at the same smaller set of bigger deals,” Karsh told PERE. “What we do is the opposite.”
The diversified fund, which can be used to target office, retail, medical office, student housing, multifamily and industrial assets, spent 21 months on the road and has a target return in the mid-teens. Its capital can be invested as equity or credit and it has no set sector allocations.
“I believe that diversification is fine, but I think the way to outperform is to put a lot of chips into high-conviction deals,” Karsh said.
For each of the four funds in the series, Karsh has made a single deployment representing more than 20 percent of the total capital. The family office and private wealth commitments come at a time when commingled funds are generally not the preferred method of private real estate investing for most high-net-worth individuals. Services firm Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2025 found that only 19 percent of family offices polled preferred to commit to funds, compared to 34 percent who favored direct investments.
“Our experience has been that family offices are nimble and tend to think creatively when it comes to deploying their capital,” Karsh said on the appeal of his non-traditional approach to sector allocation.
Karsh, who has already deployed over 70 percent of TREF IV’s capital, pointed to the November purchase of an office park in Indianapolis, Indiana, as an example of Tryperion’s strategy.
The manager bought the five-building, 1.1 million-square-foot property for $60 million with 55 percent leverage from New York-based manager DRA Advisors. Karsh identified the building as a target due to its proximity to a popular downtown mall. At the time, the office park was 68 percent occupied, but after improving common areas, renovating the exterior and adding amenities, Tryperion has since lifted occupancy to 75 percent. That prompted a university endowment, which in November declined a co-invest in the office, to commit to Tryperion’s fund, Karsh said.
The investment fits with Karsh’s strategy of targeting assets he feels are low-risk but have significant potential for improvement. In this case, the assets’ close proximity to the city’s shopping and nightlife area represented a safe bet that companies would want to be located there, Karsh explained.
“If we can mitigate the downside, we let the upside take care of itself,” he added.