Investment giant Blackstone said the chief executive of its Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust is retiring and will be succeeded by a 10-year company veteran.
Frank Cohen, chief executive of BREIT since its start in 2017, plans to retire at the end of the year after joining Blackstone in 1996. Cohen is to remain the chairman of BREIT, a fund for wealthy investors that primarily invests in stabilized, income-generating U.S. commercial real estate across key property types. It's current chief operating officer, Wesley LePatner, will take over as BREIT CEO on Jan. 1, 2025, Blackstone said.
Blackstone spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to a CoStar News request seeking details. Based on a recent BREIT filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cohen was 51 as of Aug. 15, while LePatner was 43.
“Wesley will seamlessly step in at a time when real estate values have begun to recover,” global co-heads of Blackstone Real Estate Kathleen McCarthy and Nadeem Meghji said in the statement.
LePatner spearheaded the creation of Blackstone’s Core+ business, including the unveiling of all three open-ended Core+ strategies in the United States, Europe and Asia, Blackstone said, adding that LePatner has been “integral to the success of these strategies” and has helped “conceive, build and operationalize BREIT.”
BREIT’s “portfolio is over 85% concentrated in data centers, industrial and rental housing, sectors which are benefiting from megatrends and we are well-positioned to capitalize on the highly compelling opportunities in today’s market,” LePatner said in the statement.
Cohen’s career history at Blackstone, besides serving as BREIT’s chairman and CEO, also included overseeing Blackstone Real Estate’s Americas acquisitions and serving as global head of Core+ real estate, Blackstone said.
Before joining Blackstone, LePatner spent over a decade at Goldman Sachs, according to the recent Blackstone filing.
The change at the helm at BREIT, one of Blackstone’s largest real estate funds, comes as the nonlisted real estate investment trust is recovering from its worst annual performance last year after higher interest rates upended the commercial property industry. Blackstone, the largest commercial property owner, said in July it’s spending more on real estate and other investments than it has in the past two years as it expects the Federal Reserve to begin cutting interest rates later this year.
The company said recently BREIT’s July investor redemption requests declined again month over month with BREIT receiving $691 million in requests, the lowest level since April 2022. BREIT fulfilled 100% of those requests and has been able to fully meet investors' monthly withdrawals since February after having to previously limit them, according to Blackstone.