NEW YORK CITY—As was predicted six months ago in published reports, Blackstone has closed its latest global real estate fund at a whopping $15.8 billion. The new fund, Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII, tops its predecessor by $2.5 billion; when it closed in 2012, Blackstone Real Estate Partners VII was the largest private equity real estate fund yet raised.

The Wall Street Journal reported in late March that Blackstone had institutional portion of fundraising for BREP VIII with $14.5 billion in commitments. It then planned to raise an additional $1.3 billion from retail investors, according to the WSJ; at the time a company spokesman told GlobeSt.com that the company had no comment. Substantially all the capital in BREP VIII comes from investors, domestic as well as foreign, that had participated previously in Blackstone's real estate funds.

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

The new fund is already 20% committed, with commitments to date including BREP VIII's agreement this past April to purchase $3.3 billion of equity assets from GE Capital Real Estate. The acquisition of office properties in Southern California and the Seattle and Chicago metro areas represented the entirety of GE Capital's Arden Realty platform.

More recently, BREP VIII announced that it would acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of lodging REIT Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc. in a deal valued at $6 billion including the assumption of debt. The REIT had announced it was exploring a possible sale only three weeks earlier. “As long-term investors in the lodging industry, we remain confident in the fundamentals of the sector despite recent market volatility,” Tyler Henritze, co-head of US acquisitions for Blackstone Real Estate, said when the sale was announced shortly after Labor Day.

The planned acquisition of Strategic, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange as BEE, may portend future deals by BREP VIII and other Blackstone real estate vehicles. Speaking on Thursday at the three-day Pension Real Estate Association conference in San Francisco—an event that is being held, not incidentally, at one of the BEE properties Blackstone will take private—Gray reportedly opined that stock investors have become too bearish on US real estate, and that the market's decline is likely to lead to more takeovers of publicly traded landlords in the industry. “There's a disconnect, and that creates opportunity for us,” and other investors, Gray told the audience, according to Bloomberg Business.

Earlier this week, Fitch Ratings published a report that dovetailed with some of Gray's concerns. The ratings agency said that the past six months have seen the credit profiles of REITs deteriorate “marginally.”

Although property-level fundamentals remain strong, Fitch cited the pressures that increasing development is placing on liquidity, as well as the discounted equity valuations of many companies in the sector. “The average REIT trades at a 16% discount to NAV, which limits the ability to fund external investments on a leverage-neutral basis,” according to Fitch.