Julie Solomon

Julie Solomon opened 2026 by being named the sole leader of Ares Real Estate, a position she previously shared with Bill Benjamin — and one that now has her managing a $117 billion global real estate portfolio. 

Under her watch, Ares announced in April 2026 that it raised $5.4 billion for new U.S. and Europe value-added investments. But it has been in the logistics, data and self-storage sectors, which Solomon calls “the New Economy” asset classes, where Ares has been most active in recent months. 

The deals speak for themselves. After acquiring GCP International, a $44 billion real assets firm, in March 2025, Ares unified its global logistics operation this winter by launching Marq Logistics, a new investment platform with 600 million square feet of real assets across the three global regions. 

In March 2026, Ares acquired a 36-property, 7.3 million-square-foot portfolio of U.S. logistics assets from EQT Real Estate for roughly $650 million. In December 2025, Ares purchased two data centers in Leesburg, Va., that span more than 745,000 square feet as part of a broader $700 million investment into the Northern Virginia data center corridor.

The firm has also made inroads into student housing and retail. In May 2026, Ares and the Scion Group bought a 12-campus student housing portfolio for $910 million. Just last month, Ares took Whitestone REIT private in a $1.7 billion deal, bringing 4.8 million square feet of open-air retail assets under its umbrella. 

“We have been strategic about where we’ve been leaning in — leveraging our cross-platform data to better understand and deploy into those New Economy sectors that stand to benefit from fundamental changes in how people live, work and consume in the coming decades,” said Solomon. “We’ve really witnessed an inflection point for our business over the last 12 months.”