Tim Johnson and Michael Wiebolt

Blackstone found even more ways to add value to the market in 2025, which made for a “differentiated” year compared to the previous year, Michael Wiebolt said. “Last year, markets were open and liquid, activity was strong, and one of the things that I’m most proud of is the different ways in which we were able to deploy capital across strategies around the world.”

A rolling “stone” gathers no moss, and the firm didn’t let the grass grow beneath its feet, deploying 74 percent more capital than the previous year and originating $23 billion of loans across the globe, leaning into its high-conviction sectors as market fundamentals improved. But let’s dig in a little further: First, BREDS raised an $8 billion debt fund focused on opportunities in North America, Europe and Australia. It also completed significant acquisitions of loan pools from Atlantic Union Bank ($2 billion) and First Internet Bank ($870 million), and made  mega loans including a $925 million debt facility for Colovore’s new liquid-cooled data centers.

BXMT not only launched a new net lease strategy focused on real estate inked to essential retail, but it also issued over $4 billion of corporate and securitized debt including two $1 billion CRE CLOs and the very first U.K. CMBS transaction by a commercial mortgage REIT. Blimey!

“Transaction activity certainly picked up last year, but we were also firing on all cylinders across a variety of different strategies,” Wiebolt said. “If you rewind a year ago, during the more dislocated periods of the market, we were very busy with loan pool purchase activity and also on the securities side.There was less origination activity because there were fewer transactions then, but then we started to see the direct lending opportunities pick up again in Europe and the U.S., but we also didn’t see a slowdown in the other stuff. So the past year was a really neat environment to be able to do lots of different things at once.”

When the competition heated up, Blackstone was comfortable in a range of asset classes. “Everybody likes multifamily and industrial, but there are lots of ways to deploy capital in multifamily and industrial, and having the ability to choose from amongst them is a big competitive advantage,” Wiebolt said.

Blackstone has completed more than $23 billion of bank loan portfolio acquisitions since 2020, with $5 billion of transactions last year alone. “It takes a lot of resources to source and underwrite and manage, but we’ve got 170 people across Europe, the U.S. and Australia,” Wiebolt said. “We’ve got the scale and the resources to be able to pick and choose how we play in the high-conviction themes that we have around real estate sectors and asset classes here. It’s a huge part of the differentiator and a big part of our success last year.”

This year is already off to a roaring start, with roughly $10 billion in activity already wrapped and another $10 billion in the pipeline.

“We’re seeing a continuation of the themes we saw last year, with the majority of our activity in multifamily and logistics, in data centers and in loan pools,” Wiebolt said.

While Wiebolt chose “differentiated,” to describe Blackstone’s year, he almost chose “fun.”

“I am so blessed and fortunate to get to work with the most amazing people here,” he said. “I love the team here. Everybody cares so much, and everybody rows in the same direction every day. I don’t know what else I would do every day other than this because I love what we do and I love the people that I get to do it with. I just feel super blessed.”