Ben Brown

New investments, increased fundraising, and wins within the existing portfolio are how Ben Brown would define Brookfield’s banner 2024. 

Brown was expecting a moderate year for the investment side of the business given all of the volatility around interest rates, but last year, he said, was surprisingly active. 

“Toward the middle of the second quarter, we started to get really, really busy,” Brown said. “And, through the end of the year, we did a little over $10 billion of [global] transactions in terms of new investments for our vehicles across the business.”

About 90 percent of those new deals were in the living sector — apartments, single-family rentals, student housing — and also in logistics. In 2024, Brookfield did $5 billion in multifamily, student housing and single-family portfolio acquisitions across North America alone. In logistics across North America, Brookfield did $2.1 billion in acquisitions, including $1.3 billion for a portfolio of 128 properties in high-growth markets. 

“The busiest place we were was really the U.S.,” he said. “I say North America because we did a little in Canada. But, in the time where I thought markets would be relatively slower [due to] the uncertainty at the beginning of the year in the U.S. [being] more daunting, we actually got a tremendous amount done.”

When asked about Brookfield’s biggest win in 2024, Brown said it was all the work the firm did in the housing sector. Across North America last year, Brookfield acquired a portfolio of 75 multifamily assets in San Francisco, a portfolio of 23 garden-style multifamily assets spanning 7,300 units throughout the U.S., and a $437.2 million (Canadian dollars) portfolio of high-quality multifamily assets in Toronto.

Brookfield also spent $893 million on a portfolio of 14 student housing assets in 13 markets in the U.S. 

“What we did across housing, we’re pretty excited about it,” Brown said. “We’re very bullish on the living sectors generally, just given the supply-and-demand imbalance on a global basis.”