Property industry veteran Phil Clark is glad he has a long market memory. "If my life had only existed over the last six months, it would not have been the happiest occasion."

Clark leads a three-strong property team lured from Aviva-owned Morley last October to create a new centre of excellence for Edinburgh-based Aegon Asset Management.

The team, with 60 years of industry experience between them, have defected from one of the UK's biggest property managers to run the relatively tiny £1.8bn Scottish Equitable fund. This month Morley, however, which has been struggling to replace key executives, was submerged into its parent's new creation, Aviva Investors.

Clark says: "The attraction is that Aegon is an essentially global business and a major financial services player, so it has the key ingredients for a real estate fund management business."

On the commercial property crash, he says: "What has taken people by surprise is the speed of the falls That has panicked a number of investors in open-ended funds, particularly investors that perhaps have come in more recently."

Aegon was among a clutch of managers to put a lock-in on their property fund investors earlier this year. It now requires a year's notice on redemptions from the fund, for investors not retiring or taking income.

Clark observes: "It is not like buying and selling a share, if there is a need to sell property the process typically takes a couple of months - like selling your house."

Aegon had previously outsourced its property fund management to Morley, which ran it with a different team, so the new managers have been busy building a new administration capability prior to taking charge of the fund last month.

"We think it is quite a good time to be looking at reinvesting in the UK," Clark says. "So our focus is to start looking at what will be an appropriate investment strategy for the second half of this year back into the UK We think the UK is becoming fairly priced, indeed attractively priced, and we are not alone in thinking that."

Opportunity funds began to surface at the turn of the year, since when institutional investors have been dipping their toes back into the market.

How do they buy?

"Property is a people industry," Clark says. "It is all about personal relationships in property you can get off-market deals, it is not an exchange-based system where you log in and order a slug of shares, this is about knowing somebody who is thinking about selling and making the contact, because you may have done a deal with them in the past."

Aegon's fund is low risk, bagging properties with long leases in the right sectors at the right time in that sector's economic cycle, with a historical bias towards central London.

The team worked together at Morley for eight years. Wise, who ran its pooled pension fund, will direct the Scottish Equitable fund, with Geraldine Davies, who managed the £4.2bn Norwich property trust, working alongside and devising new retail ideas. Clark, formerly at the head of a £10bn specialist fund and an expert in non-listed property, is building links with the rest of the Dutch-based group with a view to further development.

He says: "If we were starting a fund from scratch, I am sure we would look at a more global mandate, but most funds created some years ago in the UK are very much UK-focused In the next five years we will see a truly global real estate fund management industry."

Clark's own passion in property is urban regeneration, where he has led a number of industry initiatives, worked with government and as a business school lecturer.

"I look at the social side of it, it is more than just the nuts and bolts of financial decisions, it has a social benefit and a social driver There is also a sustainability side to it not just the reuse of materials but the reuse of land, and building in a sustainable way."

Aegon Asset Management is known for its fixed income funds which account for half of its £40bn, and is only now making some performance headway with its £17bn of equity funds. It will be hoping that its own significant investment into property has come at the right time.