Lowell Baron

Lowell Baron runs commercial real estate investment at one of the most prominent publicly traded asset management outfits. Brookfield’s real estate group has $277 billion in assets under management totaling 500 million square feet and overseen by some 24,000 employees. 

It didn’t use to be this way, though.

Baron arrived in 2005 from Deutsche Bank at what became Brookfield when its real estate investment practice was a nascent credit fund and a stake in office owner Brookfield Properties. There were around 20 employees, and Baron was a vice president.

Then the Global Financial Crisis happened, and Baron and his colleagues got to work. The team partnered with investors, sussed out scalable opportunities, and moved quickly to capitalize on distressed assets and other opportunities. 

It all culminated in a $4.4 billion global real estate fund raised in 2012 and 2013. (The company had aimed for $3.5 billion.) In a July podcast with tech platform Juniper Square, Baron described that initial raise as Brookfield’s “go anywhere, do anything-type of real estate opportunistic fund.” The company would raise two more global real estate funds — each larger than the last — before 2020. 

“What we found pretty quickly was that our competitive advantage was in the larger deals,” Baron recalled on that podcast. “When you got to do bigger things, you could avoid competition. There was just almost nobody at the scale of ourselves.” 

Along the way, Baron became chief investment officer of Brookfield’s real estate line, and then its CIO and president. He ascended to the CEO role in June last year. 

Today, Brookfield’s real estate group owns equity stakes in just about every asset class in every corner of the world. A sample of recent stakes illustrates the scope. In late July, it acquired a 49 percent interest, valued at about $2.1 billion, in medical real estate giant Healthpeak Properties. Around the same time, Brookfield partnered with a Canadian pension plan to buy LXP Industrial Trust for approximately $5.2 billion cash. 

And Brookfield is negotiating to take Hines’ place in the joint venture that owns the $3.5 billion Hudson Square office portfolio in Manhattan.