Yesterday NLB announced the IPO of its new real-estate fund in Slovenia, NLB Skladi - Nepremičnine (ticker NLRR; „NID“), Slovenia’s second listed property vehicle. Subscription runs 16 June to 16 October, €10 a share, €5,000 minimum. See below my preliminary views, and how it compares to Equinox (on which deep dive I am currently working on):

• With NID you buy an empty basket. It owns no property - they raise the money first, then go shopping. Buying the buildings burns real transaction costs (manager success fee, legal, due diligence, transfer tax) of roughly 1.6% of your money, taken straight out of NAV. So before anything happens you are down ~1.6%.

• Then the discount. Like almost every listed REIT - Equinox included - NID will most likely drift to a NAV discount once the IPO bid fades. Equinox sits around 18% below NAV today. Assuming NID opens a similar gap, that is another ~15–18% gone. The difference: at Equinox you buy that discount; at NID you create it.

• On top, the fee. NID charges 2.0% of NAV per year (1.75% only above €300m), and it runs from day one - on cash that has not bought anything yet. Equinox has no employees and buys in services; its effective management/admin cost is under 1% of NAV. No performance fee either way.

• Add it up and an individual buying NID is roughly ~17–20% underwater on value before earning a cent, then pays double the annual fee. I see zero reason to do it. If you want real-estate exposure through a quasi-REIT, just buy Equinox - better on every axis.

• Even for a big ticket, NID makes no sense. Axor is an active seller of Equinox - you can (probably) simply call them and negotiate a block of however many million you want, in a company with real assets, at a discount, with almost no leverage and no 2% toll. Subscribing to NID instead is the worse trade.