Global alternative asset manager Blackstone Inc on Tuesday announced it has raised $30.4 billion for its latest global real estate fund, the largest real estate or private equity drawdown fund ever raised.
The fund, called Blackstone Real Estate Partners X, is 48% bigger than the asset management giant's previous real estate fund which closed in 2019. Blackstone has delivered a 16% net IRR on over $100 billion of committed capital in the BREP global funds over more than 30 years, it said in a statement on Monday.
In total, Blackstone’s three opportunistic strategies (Global, Asia, Europe) now have $50 billion of capital commitments.
Anticipating changing macrotrends, Blackstone Real Estate shifted its portfolio away from assets facing headwinds such as traditional office and malls and is approximately 80% concentrated in logistics, rental housing, hospitality, lab office and data centers.
"Sector selection has never been more critical as we witness the bifurcation of performance within real estate," Ken Caplan, global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate, said in a statement.
Blackstone shares were up nearly 1% in premarket trading.
The private equity behemoth’s real estate business was founded in 1991 and has $326 billion of investor capital under management. Blackstone is the largest owner of commercial real estate globally, owning and operating assets across every major geography and sector, including logistics, residential, office, hospitality and retail.
In India, Blackstone manages total assets worth $50 billion, including in private equity and real estate. It has made over a billion dollars in real estate share sales alone in the past year, Reuters has reported recently.
Bullish on the India story, at a press briefing two months ago, Jonathan Gray, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer, said that India will continue to be Blackstone Inc's biggest market in Asia and the private equity giant may consider infrastructure investments there in the future.
It has also entered into the data centre business in Asia, beginning with its maiden venture with planned capacity of 600 MW across two large hyperscale data centres in India.
The US asset manager also plans to invest more in data centres and warehousing amid rise in ecommerce transactions as well as India asking technology giants such as Alphabet's Google to store customer data locally.
"India is a major part of the anchor of our Asia strategy. Japan and Australia follow that," Gray had said.
