Employees Retirement Plan of Hajoca Corporation

Employees Retirement Plan of Hajoca Corporation

The Employees Retirement Plan of Hajoca Corporation is the defined-benefit pension serving the workforce of Hajoca, a privately held wholesale distributor of plumbing, HVAC, and industrial supplies founded in Philadelphia in 1858. The plan operates under the Colburn family's broader holding company, Blackfriars Corp, which also controls Consolidated Electrical Distributors. Keith W. Colburn and David D. Colburn sit on the pension's investment committee alongside their roles managing related entities — Keith as trustee of the Colburn Trust, David at Dunton Foundries. The plan's deployment spans a hybrid mix of fund commitments and direct holdings. The pension owns at least four distribution-facility properties in Florida's Bradenton and Palmetto markets, reflecting a direct real-asset bias in industrial Sun Belt real estate. On the commingled side, confirmed positions include the Mercer US Core Real Estate Portfolio. Strategy tags indicate exposure to private credit, buyout, distressed debt, venture capital from seed to late stage, secondaries, special situations, timber, and natural resources — a book that behaves more like a family-office portfolio than a traditional pension. The plan's operating architecture ties it to a small number of named decision-makers. Offices remain concentrated in Pennsylvania — headquarters sits in Lafayette Hill. No professional headcount or AUM figure has been publicly disclosed. In mid-2024, Hajoca's operating business highlighted a technology-forward warehouse transformation on its corporate site, continuing a pattern of internal modernization that dates to the company's 1981 privatization and subsequent acquisition-led expansion across the Southeast and into Florida's pool-supply market. The pension's structural profile is defined by its embedded position inside the Blackfriars family-holding-company ecosystem, blurring the line between a corporate ERISA plan and a family-aligned co-investment vehicle. Unlike stand-alone corporate pensions, this plan shares committee oversight and ownership links with sibling operating companies, a configuration that shapes both its direct real-estate concentration and its broad alternative-asset strategy.