Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman (Credit: Getty Images, iStock)
UPDATED: Monday, June 3 at 10:45 a.m. Blackstone Group is betting big on ecommerce with an $18.7 billion purchase of warehouse assets across the U.S., one of the largest industrial real estate deals in history.
The properties span 179 million square feet overall, and Blackstone is buying them from the Singapore company GLP Pte, according to Bloomberg. Retailers have needed more space for warehouse property as the popularity of online shopping continues to grow.
Blackstone has made several deals to purchase logistics space in recent years. Last year, it purchased Canyon Industrial Portfolio’s last-mile assets for $1.8 billion and reached a $1.9 billion deal to buy Canada’s Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust. It also agreed to spend $950 million for more than 100 warehouse assets from Harvard University’s endowment.
There are about 1,300 properties in the GLP portfolio, and Amazon is its biggest tenant. Blackstone, the world’s largest private manager of real estate assets, won the properties in an auction that also saw bids from Prologis and Brookfield Asset Management.
“Logistics is our highest conviction global investment theme today,” Ken Caplan, the global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate said in the statement, “and we look forward to building on our existing portfolio to meet the growing e-commerce demand.”
In April, Blackstone said its assets under management reached $512 billion. It’s in the process of seeking $5 billion for its latest real estate fund.
[Bloomberg] – Eddie Small
Correction: An earlier version of this article, repeated from the Bloomberg report, said this was the biggest private equity real estate deal ever. In fact, the largest private equity real estate deal was Blackstone’s $39 billion purchase of the Equity Office portfolio.