BlackRock to buy $2.7B in European real estate

Private equity behemoth betting on weak euro

Larry Fink Euro
From left: Larry Fink (credit: Financial Times/Flickr) and some Euro notes

The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, plans to take advantage of the weak euro to buy as much as $2.7 billion in European property over the next three years.

The euro has fallen by about 12 percent relative to the U.S. dollar over the past year, leading many investors, especially those hailing from North America, Asia and the Middle East, to buy in.

Those buyers bought 32.5 billion euros worth of commercial property in Europe in the first 9 months of 2015, according to Real Capital Analytics.

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BlackRock will focus on “value-add” buildings where it can renovate or add new tenants. And they’re not the only ones.

Investors purchase 19 billions euros worth of European value add properties in the first six months of the year, a 50 percent increase from the previous year according to Real Capital Analytics, Bloomberg reported.

In 2006, Midtown-based BlackRock, led by Larry Fink, bought Stuyvesant Town along with Tishman Speyer for $5.4 billion. The developers were forced to release the property to their creditors in 2010, but Fink recently said he’d do it all over again. [Bloomberg] – Ariel Stulberg