The private equity giant has tapped into retail investors’ desires to invest in private real estate.
Blackstone Group has changed this game. It created Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT) about five years ago to target individual investors. The non-traded real estate investment trust has grown into one of Blackstone’s biggest funds, raising more than $50 billion.
Those features have made it a hit with investors, enabling Blackstone to cash in on growing individual investor demand for private real estate. This demand has been nearly insatiable over the past year and a half. Investors have been pouring in an average of $2 billion into BREIT per month. That’s almost 70% of all the money raised by non-traded REITs over the past year.
Blackstone’s success has led other private equity giants to enter the non-traded REIT market. KKR and Brookfield Asset Management have launched non-traded REITs in the past year. Brookfield took over the management of a portfolio of properties from its subsidiary Oaktree Capital Management to launch a non-traded REIT in November. It also seeded Brookfield REIT with three more assets, bringing its total assets under management to nearly $1 billion. That larger scale should help Brookfield REIT better compete with other offerings in the market.
Read more/Source: The Motley Fool
