James Hogan, 29
Senior associate at Blackstone
James Hogan has always been interested in business, but he’s come a long way from selling backpacks at Eton boarding school in England.
The U.K. native first got a taste for business selling merchandise to his friends. After crossing the pond for college, he dove into real estate first through private equity, then through investment banking and finally landed at Blackstone in 2016.
Just last year, Hogan worked on the real estate giant’s $12.8 billion deal to purchase investment trust American Campus Communities, giving Blackstone another 111,900 beds across 166 properties in 71 university markets. That’s on top of the 30,000 beds Blackstone already owned. The deal exemplified why Hogan loves real estate: It’s an asset everyone gets to experience one way or another.
“I think that’s what makes this interesting, and real estate in general — it’s something that all of us can relate to through our different walks of life,” Hogan said. “It’s where you are, it’s where you live, it’s where you go to school, and it’s where you shop and you eat, and so it was an interesting transaction to work on from that perspective, because we all were in those dorm rooms not that long ago.”
Hogan also worked on Blackstone’s $3.4 billion acquisition of a 2.3 million-square-foot portfolio of Cambridge, Mass., lab and office buildings from Brookfield Asset Management last year. And he said he’s keeping an eye on the life sciences sector, along with the industrial and multifamily markets, going into 2023.
When not thinking about billions of dollars worth of real estate, Hogan tries to surround himself with art through regular trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — especially to peek at Mark Rothko’s vibrant color block paintings — and by painting himself, he said. —C.Y.
