Blackstone Boosts Student Housing Portfolio With $784M Joint Venture
By Celia Young August 20, 2021 2:10 pm
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Multibillion-dollar investment giant Blackstone (BX) has started a $784 million joint venture with Landmark Properties to recapitalize eight student housing locations, totaling 5,416 beds across the United States.
Georgia-based Landmark owns and operates more than 75 student housing properties across the nation. The companies’ partnership expands Blackstone’s already considerable real estate reach into the student housing sector.
“We’ve seen a very quick uptick in student housing occupancy to pre-COVID levels, which is one of the reasons we’re so bullish on the space,” Blackstone’s Jacob Werner said in a statement to Commercial Observer.
Blackstone purchased billions of dollars of real estate assets during the pandemic, ranging from single-family homes to life sciences lab space, CO reported. It finished the first quarter of 2021 with $196.3 billion in real estate assets under management, up 22 percent from the $160.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020.
As the world’s largest private owner of commercial real estate, Blackstone is only getting bigger. The company, investing under the non-traded Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, is optimistic about the student housing sector as students return to in-person instruction and with the market experiencing a supply shortage.
“The deal, more broadly, is part of Blackstone’s conviction that the U.S. faces a shortage of residential of all varieties, including single-family homes and apartments,” Werner said. “For the most part, housing has been undersupplied in this country since the Great Financial Crisis. We think this investment plays to a similar supply-demand perspective as our broader residential portfolio.”
Blackstone has invested in the sector before. The company formed a partnership with Greystar Real Estate Partners in 2018 to purchase a 10,500-bed student housing portfolio for $1.2 billion, and bought another 28,000-bed portfolio in the United Kingdom from Goldman Sachs in 2020 for $6 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
