Blackstone's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan
NEW YORK CITY—Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT) and Columbia, Md.-based Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) have formed a joint venture in which Blackstone will acquire seven of COPT's single-tenant data center shell properties, which also contain 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space, for $265 million. The joint venture will be owned 90% by BREIT and 10% by COPT, which received $238.5 million in proceeds from the deal.
This is a new partnership, according to COPT CEO Stephen E. Budorick. The transaction, he says in prepared remarks, “demonstrates the strength of demand for strategically located data center shell properties leased to high credit tenants.”
North American Data Centers and KeyBanc Capital Markets served as COPT's advisors on this transaction.
Blackstone has exposure to the data center asset class, albeit not at the same level as, say, it has to the industrial sector.
Earlier this year, Blackstone's Strategic Capital Group acquired a minority stake in GI Partners, a middle-market alternative asset manager. According to Bloomberg, GI plans to launch a digital infrastructure fund targeting these assets including data centers.
In Australia Blackstone had owned the DCI Data Centers portfolio company, which it sold in January 2019 to Brookfield Infrastructure.
In 2017 Blackstone Tactical Opportunities made an equity investment in Ascenty, a top provider of data center and telecom services in Brazil.
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
