Blackstone Raises $15.8 Billion for Latest Global Real Estate Fund

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The Blackstone Group, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, raised $15.8 billion for its latest global real estate fund, Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII.

At present, the firm is managing two regional opportunistic real estate funds—the $8.2 billion Blackstone Real Estate Partners Europe IV and the $5 billion Blackstone Real Estate Partners Asia.

The alternative asset manager raised more than 90% of the money from institutional investors, according to people familiar with fundraising in March. Blackstone raised the remainder from the individual investors, a process that took longer to complete because of paperwork, said one person to Bloomberg.

Blackstone Global Real Estate Fund is already 20% committed

In a statement, Blackstone’s global head of real estate Jon Gray said, “We are grateful to our limited partners for their continued support, and remain committed to delivering favorable returns. The size of this fund gives us the ability to commit capital in scale with speed and certainty.”

On the other hand, the Kathleen McCarthy, COO of Blackstone’s real estate group commented that the fundraising showed the company’s strong relationship with its limited partners for more than two decades. According to her, “The fund is already 20% committed, and we continue to see compelling opportunities to deploy capital.”

In April, Blackstone entered a $14 billion agreement to acquire the real estate assets of General Electric Capital CorporationThe firm also agreed to buy Strategic Hotels & Resorts, publicly traded real estate investment trust, for approximately $3.9 billion.

Blackstone is a global leader in real estate investing

Blackstone successfully built the largest real estate investing business with approximately $92 billion in investor capital under management. Its real estate portfolio includes hotel, office, retail, industrial and residential properties in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Some of its major investments include Hilton Worldwide, Invitation Homes (single family homes), Logicor (pan-European logistics), SCP (Chinese shopping malls), and prime office buildings in the world’s major cities.

Blackstone completes spinoff of PJT Partners

Separately, Blackstone also announced the completion of the spinoff of its financial and strategic advisory services, restructuring and reorganization advisory services and Park Hill Group businesses.

Blackstone combined those businesses with PJT Capital to form an independent, publicly traded company called PJT Partners. According to the firm, its common unitholders of record as of the close of business on September 22 received one share of Class A common stock of PJT Partners for every 40 common units of Blackstone held.

The spinoff was structured tax free to Blackstone unitholders of U.S. Federal income tax purposes, except to the extent of any gain or loss recognized by a common unitholder as a result of any cash received in lieu of fractional shares.

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