Scott Weiner

When it came to large loans, few originated them bigger and more often than Apollo Global Management this past year. 

Holding $61 billion in assets under management (of which 70 percent is in the U.S.), Scott Weiner’s private equity powerhouse continued to dominate capital markets in 2024.

Apollo made an impressive $16 billion in originations, with an average loan size coming out to a stunning $156 million.  Perhaps more importantly this past year, against an increasingly volatile market environment and geopolitical backdrop, Apollo offered borrowers certainty of execution across the capital stack, allowing them to work with one capital source and eliminate syndication risk.

Weiner added that 2024 was defined by “repeat business, referrals to new clients, and having the right capital and balance sheet.”

“We can do $50 million deals and multibillion-dollar deals, and we can do a number of different property types, so it’s a wide business range,” Weiner told CO. “But it’s a people business, and the team that we have put together started in 2009 and has been doing it year in and year out.”

Apollo’s business last year was dominated by residential and industrial, which made up 50 percent of its assets in 2024. Two other sectors stood out: data centers and hospitality, which generated a quarter of the firm’s balance sheet. 

Two of the firm’s biggest deals were a $530 million first-mortgage origination so Site Centers Corporation could refinance a portfolio of 23 retail properties across 11 states, and a $445 million construction loan to Starwood Capital Group so it could build Renaissance Technology Park, a hyperscale data center campus in Herndon, Va. 

“It’s an asset class that encompasses a wide range of both tenancy and design,” said Weiner of data centers. “And we have been more focused on the hyperscale, the larger data centers that are long-term leased to the Metas, the Apples and the Oracles of the world.”

Weiner also pointed out that, unlike many CRE investment firms, Apollo eschews the commission-based structure in favor of allowing individual employees to work together across different business lines and receive the fruits of labor provided by experts across the entire firm. 

“It works much better when people are working together as opposed to viewing their colleagues as competition,”  he said.