LaSalle Investment Management, a unit of property services firm Jones Lang LaSalle, last year spent 140 billion to 150 billion yen in Asian property markets, mostly in Japan and Australia, which were seen as market laggards.

In Japan last year, LaSalle bought a dozen properties including apartments, office buildings and logistics centers as well as an outlet shopping mall.

“We want to invest (this year) about the same or more as what we spent last year,” Yasuo Nakashima, chief executive officer of LaSalle’s Japan arm, told Reuters in an interview. “Luckily, our war chest is big enough.”

Nakashima  said the US investor was keen to pour its resources into basic real estate investments requiring operational knowhow, such as development and leasing of hotels, shopping malls and office buildings in selected areas.

LaSalle does not see Japan’s residential property market as an attractive area for investment at this moment, however, as most deals are too small, Nakashima said. “We almost always have concerns about Japan’s macroeconomic outlook, but Japan still is an attractive market for long-term investment given low borrowing costs.”

LaSalle Investment Management, ranked No.17 in the global list of active property buyers in the past 12 months, has $45 billion in assets under management globally. In Asia, LaSalle manages about $8 billion, of which Japan accounts for about 60 percent.