Blackstone surpasses Brookfield as world’s biggest real estate manager

Blackstone is once again the world’s largest real estate manager after overtaking Brookfield Property Partners [TRDataCustom] last year.

Blackstone’s real estate assets grew 6 percent in 2016 to $160 billion, the Financial Times reported. Brookfield slipped to the second spot with $158 billion in assets, an increase of 2.6 percent.

PGIM, the investment arm of Prudential, took the third-place spot with $130 billion, and TH Real Estate, the property arm of Chicago-based asset manager Nuveen Investments, was the fourth-largest with $103 billion in assets.

Property managers raised $137 billion in new capital last year, down a tick from the record $139 billion raised in 2015, according to data from Inrev, a European association that represents investors in non-listed real estate companies.

Brookfield created the world’s largest global property fund last year, raising $9 billion from more than 100 institutional investors.

Fund managers have raised more than $560 billion in new capital since the beginning of 2012, and all that money has pushed real estate prices higher. Inrev research director Henri Vuong said “deploying capital is becoming more challenging for managers” considering how much money has been raised over the past few years.

Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, however, said large capital flows from institutional investors would not necessarily lead to a real estate bubble.

“We are not seeing the same excesses that we saw in the pre-crisis years,” he said. [FT] – Rich Bockmann

(To view Blackstone properties, click here. To view Brookfield properties, click here)