Debra Mistretta
Managing director and co-head of real estate at BlackRock
For more than two decades, Debra Mistretta has been advising the investment strategy at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $15.3 trillion in assets under management.
But it was only in 2023 that she was named co-head of BlackRock’s Americas Real Estate Equity business, where she has quarterbacked the firm into asset classes as diverse as supply-constrained apartment and grocery-anchored retail to net-lease and industrial properties.
2025 and 2026 were big years for BlackRock. While Mistretta did not work on this deal directly, the firm completed its noteworthy September 2025 acquisition of St. Louis-based ElmTree Funds, a real estate private equity firm that specializes in single-tenant, build-to-suit industrial properties for net-leased, investment-grade tenants. The $7.3 billion acquisition brought 122 properties across 31 U.S. states under BlackRock’s watch, further positioning the firm to increase industrial expertise.
The acquisition paved the way for BlackRock to launch its latest innovation: HPS Net Lease Income REIT, a venture formed in December 2025 by BlackRock out of the ElmTree deal and its July 2025 purchase of HPS Investment Partners. The private fund will aim to acquire stabilized industrial properties on net leases across the U.S.
The firm also made direct investments into domestic self-storage operators, notably providing $101.5 million of debt capital to Basis Industrial to refinance a seven-property self-storage portfolio spread across six U.S. states.
Then there is the firm’s data center business, which seems to be growing at a geometric rate.
Down in El Paso, Texas, the firm is partnering with Meta on a $12 billion data center complex with 1 gigawatt of capacity. This development comes after BlackRock engaged in one of the largest data center deals ever this July when it acquired hyperscale data center operator Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management in a $40 billion transaction, one that brings 50 data center campuses into BlackRock’s ever-expanding portfolio.
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