Blackstone’s $56B REIT names CEO 

Blackstone’s flagship property fund has found a new leader. It didn’t have to look far.

Chief operating officer Wesley LePatner will assume the CEO role of the $56 billion Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, the company announced. She will take over at the end of the year from the retiring Frank Cohen, who will remain as chair of BREIT’s board of directors.

LePatner has been with Blackstone since 2014, helping to launch the firm’s Core+ business. She has been COO and a board member of BREIT, one of the largest nontraded real estate investment trusts. It has had a topsy-turvy run as of late.

In a statement, Cohen called LePatner a “phenomenal leader.”

LePatner will be running an entity that has made a sizable shift in its holdings in recent years. BREIT’s portfolio is more than 85 percent concentrated in data centers, rental housing and the industrial market, LePatner said in a statement. That’s a far cry from its previous investments in the office market.

After a period of declining to fulfill investor redemption requests, BREIT eventually relented, fulfilling every such request in February. At that time, redemption requests were falling, though fundraising wasn’t hitting earlier levels, either.

In 2023, BREIT failed to generate enough cash to cover its dividend, leading to the first annual shortfall in its history. Fund generation may become easier if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, which appears to be imminent based on Jerome Powell’s recent comments.

The fund, meanwhile, has been seeking to take advantage of dislocations in the property market. In a letter to shareholders earlier in the year, Blackstone said the commercial sector was at an “inflection point” and noted that “values are bottoming.”

Since being created more than seven years ago, BREIT’s annualized net return is 10 percent.

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