NEW YORK CITY—The Blackstone Group has promoted Kenneth Caplan to the newly created position of global CIO within its Blackstone Real Estate Partners unit. A spokeswoman for Blackstone confirms published reports that Caplan is now second in command to Jonathan Gray, the firm's global head of real estate.
Caplan's promotion was effective at the start of this year, Bloomberg reported Thursday evening. Prior to his assuming the global CIO post, Caplan had been a senior managing director and head of real estate for Europe.
London-based Anthony Myers, who joined the company in 2000, has succeeded Caplan as head of BREP's European platform. “With the increasing size and scale of our real estate business, it is only natural that we are tapping two 15-year-plus veterans of the firm to take on additional responsibility,” Gray says in a statement.
Since joining Blackstone in 1997, Caplan has worked across a variety of property sectors and has been involved in some of its largest transactions, including the 2007 acquisition of Equity Office Properties. He had been head of real estate Europe since 2011. Before Blackstone, Caplan worked as an analyst in the real estate investment banking group of Lazard Freres & Co.
Currently, BREP is in the process of raising Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII, an opportunistic fund that's reportedly on the scale of its predecessor. Blackstone Real Estate Partners VII, which closed in 2012, set an industry record at $13.3 billion.
Caplan and other key players within Blackstone's real estate unit discussed the asset management firm's strategy for a story that originally appeared in Real Estate Forum, sister publication to GlobeSt.com. Click here for an HTML version of that story.
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