Not a new topic to me, but thanks for the guidance.
That article is in error. It’s easy to confuse BlackRock and BlackStone. B’Rock even began as part of B’Stone.
“Blackstone is an asset manager, a type of private financial firm that invests the wealth of pension funds and insurance companies. It is not to be confused with BlackRock, an asset management firm founded by Larry Fink, who worked for Blackstone in the 1980s and set up its bond-investment business. In 1994, BlackRock became an independent firm and Blackstone sold its shares in the company. Fink and Schwarzman now work on opposite sides of Park Avenue. Fink’s company dwarfs Blackstone, but when it comes to property, Blackstone is the giant. Its $320bn real estate portfolio is more than six times larger than that of BlackRock. “For Blackstone, real estate is the goose that lays the golden egg,” Brett Christophers, a professor of geography and author of a forthcoming book about the asset management industry, told me.
In the 2000s, Blackstone’s real estate division was known for buying up office spaces and hotels. Now, it seems to prefer life-science laboratories and warehouses rented out to last-mile delivery firms. But it is Blackstone’s interest in another type of real estate that has attracted the most scrutiny. In recent years, it has become known for creating a profitable asset class from residential properties – in other words, buying up homes. Unlike warehouses or office blocks, the principal revenue source in rental homes are the people who live in them. Although Blackstone insists that its top priority is providing a good service, the finance industry’s expectation of increasing returns can seem at odds with the interests of tenants.
In the years before the pandemic, the company presented its “conviction themes” – the areas where it plans to invest – to its largest shareholders at an annual investor meeting. (This event used to be held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, which Blackstone used to own.) “It was like drinking from a firehose in the world of real estate,” a former Blackstone executive told me of one meeting at the Waldorf. “You could be talking about shopping centres in Shanghai one minute, offices in Seattle the next minute. In that room, you’d probably be more informed about what was happening in the world of real estate than in any other room on the planet.”
When Blackstone buys a building – say, an office block in London – employees are dispatched to “walk the asset”, considering its size and location, ceiling height, ventilation, natural light, transport links, the number of lunch spots nearby, how many students, creatives and computer programmers are moving to the area and what other businesses are located there. After employees have visited the site and combed through its paperwork, they gather with colleagues from the firm’s American, European and Asian offices to review and “socialise” the proposed deal. The final step is to secure approval from the real estate investment committee at its Monday meeting. For major acquisitions, senior leaders will fly in from New York to walk the space if they are not yet convinced by its commercial appeal.
This methodical, even cautious, approach to investing has yielded big rewards. Today, the name of Blackstone’s founder can be seen on universities and public institutions across the US. There is a Stephen Schwarzman building at the New York Public Library, a Schwarzman centre at Yale University and the Schwarzman College of Computing in Massachusetts. Soon, the University of Oxford will open the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, funded by the largest single donation it has ever received. Yet, beyond the inscription of its founder’s name into buildings and brass plaques, Blackstone is shaping the cities around us in a more profound way.”
“Blackstone started making major investments in homes shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, when tantalising new opportunities emerged. The cheap credit that rolled across the world in the years before the financial crisis had allowed people to momentarily live out a dream. In the US, they bought sprawling houses that they could no longer afford once the carousel stopped. In Spain, where Blackstone would also set its sights, the entire country got drunk on the GDP growth that flowed from its bloated construction sector. In both places, a real estate bubble was sustained by nothing more than an expectation that property prices would continue to rise. When they started to fall, the results were catastrophic. But not for Blackstone.
Before 2008, major real estate investors had focused on the places where people worked or shopped. After the financial crisis, the industry started eyeing up the places where people lived. In the US, as more and more people found themselves unable to pay their mortgages, thousands of houses became available at discounted prices. In spring 2012, Blackstone dispatched employees to hoover up such properties. It founded a subsidiary, Invitation Homes, to manage its new kingdom of houses, which spanned from Seattle to Atlanta.
“We were very particular about the assets we were buying,” Alexandra Thur, a former equity partner who joined Invitation Homes before the company even had a name or email address, told me. The firm looked for two- or three-bedroom houses in sunnier climes where an economic recovery seemed more likely. It avoided struggling cities such as Detroit or Cleveland. Invitation Homes hired local agents who knew every detail about the neighbourhood, right down to whether a street had a “weird church” or a rundown shopping parade on it, Thur recalled. Soon, the company was spending as much as $125m on houses every week.”