Blackstone, the world’s largest commercial property owner, sees opportunities to spend capital and “plant seeds of future value” despite uncertainty about when the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates.
The private equity giant, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management, on Thursday said its real estate business posted positive investment performance in the first quarter after a decline in the fourth quarter and the past 12 months.
Breaking down its real estate segment, Blackstone’s riskier opportunistic investment performance inched up 0.3% after a 5.6% drop in the past 12 months while its more stable income-producing investments rose 1.2% following a 1.5% drop over that time. The gains would have been even higher without the impact of translated overseas results against a stronger dollar, Chief Financial Officer Michael Chae said Thursday on an earnings call with Wall Street analysts.
Outside of real estate, Blackstone’s private equity, credit and insurance, and other segments all posted positive performance returns.
The real estate results also contributed to Blackstone’s distributable earnings, or profit available to shareholders and a key performance metric. It inched up 1% to $1.27 billion following a 15% decline in the past 12 months. Net income attributable to Blackstone jumped about 10 times to $847.4 million from $85.8 million a year earlier in part as its fee-related performance revenue doubled.
We see an “improving external environment,” Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chairman and CEO, said on the earnings call, adding 2023 marked a “cyclical bottom” even as “changing market conditions take time” to translate into performance.
We see “positive momentum … [to] plant seeds of future value. It’s a favorable time for deployment.”
Among its key investment areas, Schwarzman pointed to digital infrastructure, logistics, and energy transition.
“Digital infrastructure is one of [Blackstone’s] highest conviction themes,” he said. “Just as we recognized the rise of e-commerce with warehouse [investments], we anticipate the paradigm shift [in infrastructure demand].”
Focus on Data Centers
In fact, Blackstone owns $50 billion of data centers globally including facilities under construction with another $50 billion in prospective future development pipeline, he said. Driven by demand for content creation, cloud services adoption, and now the growing use of artificial intelligence, he said Blackstone’s data center lease capacity has grown sixfold in less than three years.
Blackstone is also spending a lot of time on power and energy needs tied to AI and growing data center demand, said Jonathan Gray, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer.
We “focus on the whole ecosystem of AI,” he said, adding Blackstone also is investing in AI-related businesses.
Blackstone in 2021 bought data center provider QTS for $10 billion. It also has a partnership with Digital Realty to develop $7 billion of data centers.
The growing data center demand coming from AI is real, Digital Realty Chief Executive Andrew Power told CoStar News on Wednesday, adding its data centers count among customers tech giants such as Google and Microsoft.
As Blackstone has increased investments in lending, including high-yield real estate debt, to capitalize on the seized-up financing facing the market in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s string of rate hikes since early 2022, Schwarzman said Blackstone sees opportunities to lend in areas including infrastructure and energy transition.
“Infrastructure is clearly an area with a lot of potential for us,” Gray said, adding energy transition infrastructure and digital infrastructure have been the biggest value driver in real estate and other business areas for Blackstone. “There are opportunities geographically globally [including in Europe and in Asia]. … Infrastructure credit is something we are doing as well.”
Blackstone raised a further $2.2 billion for its latest European opportunistic real estate fund, BREP Europe VII, as it looks to take advantage of plateauing property prices. The fund targets logistics, residential, hospitality, and data center properties.
Apartment Attraction
Multifamily also remains an investment focus, Gray said, adding the medium- and long-term supply trend for the sector remains positive. While the U.S. population has doubled since the 1960s, the amount of housing produced in the country remains the same, he said.
The United States has been “underbuilding supply here, going back to the financial crisis, now for more than 15 years,” he said Wednesday at New York University Schack Institute of Real Estate’s annual REIT symposium. “That structural shortage provides support. Right now, obviously, the public markets are focused on this near-term deceleration, particularly in multifamily because of the new supply … from some of the Sun Belt markets. … We look at that long-term structural shortage that's out there, we can buy high-quality real estate in good markets and at favorable prices that makes sense for us.”
For instance, Blackstone spent $24.5 billion last quarter on transactions, including its move to take private Tricon Residential. This month it announced the purchase of Apartment Income REIT for $10 billion.
While Blackstone has cut its office exposure with U.S. office buildings representing just 1% of its real estate portfolio, he said the sector, where demand was hard hit by the impact of remote work, also may present some opportunities.
“It is an interesting time to look at more modern buildings in office,” he said at the NYU event, adding older buildings, however, still require “substantial” capital spending needs. He pointed to some of the modern buildings in well-located areas in New York beginning to “fill up.”
“Right now, investors are looking at office buildings through a different lens,” he said. “The negative sentiment is everything. The decline in office building values has occurred. ... There's sort of a healing process that's gone on [similar with that in the U.S. mall sector]. In the office business, something similar will happen over time.”
Blackstone is looking at opportunities to buy “super-high-quality” buildings at depressed prices, he said.