Julia Butler Appointed CIO of KKR Real Estate Select Trust
By Andrew Coen May 24, 2023 1:19 pm
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KKR (KKR) has promoted Julia Butler to a newly created chief investment officer role for its closed-end real estate fund platform, the firm announced Wednesday.
Butler, who joined KKR in 2017 as a managing director on the real estate team, will now oversee investment management for KKR Real Estate Select Trust (KREST), a fund the firm launched in 2021.
“Julia is a senior leader of our real estate business with two decades of experience investing across the real estate capital structure as both an equity and credit investor,” Ralph Rosenberg, chairman of KREST and global head of KKR Real Estate, said in a statement. “She has played an integral role in scaling KKR’s real estate business to over $65 billion in assets under management and she will be a key contributor to the continued commercial success of KREST.”
Prior to joining KKR, Butler was an executive vice president at iStar, a publicly traded real estate investment trust. She previously held positions in the treasury department of The Walt Disney Company in Los Angeles.
Billy Butcher, CEO of KREST and chief operating officer of KKR Global Real Estate, said Butler positions the fund to “take advantage of a once-a-decade real estate investing environment” given the pullback of the debt capital markets of late.
A cum laude graduate of Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in government, Butler is active with several real estate organizations including the Urban Land Institute, the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council and New York Women Executives in Real Estate. She also is on the board of directors for Women in Need, New York City’s largest homeless organization for women and children.
“We see significant opportunities on the horizon for private real estate investors with a long-term outlook, and expect 2023 to be a strong vintage for private real estate,” Butler said. “I look forward to continuing to build on our thematic investing, rigorous portfolio management and investment discipline that leverages KKR’s global platform to deliver on further downside-protected growth.”
Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com
