Marc Zahr

For Marc Zahr, life moves pretty fast. After founding Oak Street Real Estate Capital in 2009, Zahr found himself in the enviable position of merging into Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz’s Blue Owl Capital 12 years later to provide the foundation for the new firm’s real assets business. 

At the time, Blue Owl was a pretty big deal. Then it started growing. 

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Blue Owl’s real assets platform focused on a single strategy and held $12 billion of assets under management. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2025, and Blue Owl’s real assets platform hit $67 billion, thanks to Zahr prioritizing three primary strategies within real assets: single-tenant, long-duration, triple-net leases; real estate credit; and digital infrastructure, primarily data centers. 

“Our DNA is doing things differently and thinking about things differently than most people in this space,” said Zahr. 

Its specialty is triple-net leases — a structure where the tenant covers expenses like taxes, insurance and maintenance, and in return landlords and investors such as Blue Owl acquire the assets of the balance sheet of their clients and lease them back to the tenant (providing their counterparty immediate capital). Or they invest in build-to-suit developments using their own investment dollars, typically incentivized by 20- to 30-year leases. 

“It’s the premise of our business when we started in 2009, and the backbone of everything we want to do in our real assets business: de-risk the investment and get as much visibility and predictability on our cash flows as possible,” said Zahr. 

But Blue Owl’s real estate expertise goes well beyond triple-net leases for blue-chip tenants like Oracle. The firm announced in November that it raised $5.3 billion for its Blue Owl Real Estate Fund VI. Moreover, the firm’s real estate credit business stands at $15 billion, and its digital infrastructure vertical has close to another $15 billion in assets. 

“What we’re supposed to do every single day is look to deliver the highest return while taking the least amount of risk,” said Zahr. “Always put your investors first. If you remember not to lose money and put a counterparty ahead of yourself, you’ll generally do well.”