Report: Blackstone Buys Industrial Portfolio For $950M

NEW YORK–Blackstone Group has scooped up another industrial portfolio — 100 properties totaling 14 million square feet, located mostly in urban areas in southeastern states, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cites people familiar with the matter. The seller was reported to be Harvard University’s endowment and the sales price, $950 million.

The transaction follows a number of purchases by the private equity giant in this asset class. To name one: in May Blackstone Property Partners and Ivanhoé Cambridge acquired Canadian REIT Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust for $2 billion. In March https://www.globest.com/2018/03/13/blackstone-reit-buys-industrial-portfolio-for-1-8b/ Blackstone REIT acquired the 22-million square foot Canyon Industrial Portfolio for approximately $1.8 billion. Most significant of all, Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII acquired Gramercy Property Trust for $7.6 billion.

Like these other acquisitions, the Harvard portfolio deal consists of last mile warehouses.

Harvard acquired the properties jointly with MDH Partners, a real estate development company that has worked with Blackstone in the past, according to Real Estate Alert, which first reported the news and was cited by Bloomberg.

This is not the first deal Harvard’s endowment fund has struck with Blackstone, the university’s newspaper, The Crimson reports. HMC sold a majority stake in a collection of New York City properties for nearly $244 million to Blackstone earlier this year, it reported.

This year Blackstone topped a list of global real estate fund managers for the second year running, with assets under management of $214.9 billion up by $47.8 billion from the previous year, according to the Fund Manager Survey 2018, published by INREV, ANREV and NCREIF. The survey also revealed an 11% uplift in total AUM among global real estate funds from $2.7 trillion to $3.14 trillion in 2017.