The Real Estate Investment department invests in assets through joint ventures and real estate funds. Real estate holdings offer income streams that typically rise with inflation and tend to match CPP’s inflation-linked liabilities. The real estate holdings also tend to help cushion the fund against business cycle volatility.

The CPP Investment Board’s $7.9 billion real estate portfolio contains mostly office and retail commercial properties. These are located in major centres across Canada (including Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City), in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, across Europe and in the Asia–Pacific region.