Blackstone Goes All-In on Industrial, Ventures Boldly Into Retail

NEW YORK CITY- Blackstone is all-in on industrial, viewing the favored asset class that has seen vacancies at record-lows thanks to e-commerce as poised for even greater growth as more and more investors seek to gobble up warehouses closer to dense city centers. 

And aside from betting on the tried and true industrial asset class, the alternative asset manager is tooting its horn about venturing off the beaten path as it continues to tap into the retail market more broadly through its non-traded REIT the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, according to Stephen Schwarzman, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone at Goodwin’s Real Estate Capital Markets Conference 2020. 

Blackstone started buying warehouse logistics in 2010, betting it was a good investment as e-commerce behemoth Amazon began to increase its market share, predicting that other retailers would follow suit, thus leading Blackstone to sell-off its shopping malls and acquire an estimated one billion square feet of warehouses across the world to date. “Once you understood what was happening with online shopping and that every retailer in scale would need to do something similar [to Amazon],  the whole game was gonna change,” Schwarzman said. 

The firm remains with 800 million square feet of its warehouse portfolio after selling 200 million square feet. Despite rising prices in the sector, the firm has no intention of slowing down as investors compete for warehouses closer and closer to city centers like bumper carts, mainly because tenants are willing to pay double the rent to offer one-day delivery to customers. The fundamentals are promising given that rental costs are a very small part of total distribution costs in the supply chain for an online retailer.

The closer an investor buys an existing warehouse to a city, the more rising costs are justified because there is less competition, according to Schwarzman, who says the firm is aiming to penetrate denser markets globally for warehouse acquisitions. “Prices have gotten higher and the only way to offset that is to buy closer and closer into cities,” he said. “It’s been great, and better than malls by the way.”

Another focus for Blackstone is tapping the retail market more broadly through its non-traded REIT BREIT, seeing a need in the retail market to bring its institutional quality product to a broader range of accredited investors. And with the retail market valued at an estimated $50 trillion, the demand for its product has been a happy marriage, according to Schwarzman.

”We said ‘jeez wouldn’t retail people like to have the same kind of institutional quality product that we do’ where we’ve raised these enormous sums of money,” Schwarzman said. “We went to the retail market and said ‘we’re not gonna price this the way other people have where they take a huge amount of profit away from you and move it to us. We’ll charge in line what we charge institutions and give you the benefit of getting a high level of current income and appreciation that’ll hopefully take you into double digits.’”

The retail market was largely receptive, he said. “We found out there’s a huge demand for this, but in particular with our name and credibility, so we handle this like we do our other stuff.”