Ralph Rosenberg
Ralph Rosenberg
Partner and Global Head of Real Estate at KKR & Co.
KKR launched its dedicated real estate business in 2011, but don’t let its tender young age fool you. Today, the firm has $59 billion in assets under management, as of March 31, with 13 offices in 10 countries and 135 investment and asset-management professionals on the payroll.
A consistently impressive force in the industry, and often ahead of the curve when it comes to investing in coveted asset types, KKR has acquired approximately $7 billion of U.S. logistics assets since 2018 alone and currently owns over 45 million square feet of industrial real estate.
In August 2021, it sold a $2.2 billion industrial portfolio to Oxford Properties, but that was only part of KKR’s impressive resume this past year. To name but a few noteworthy headlines, it had a particularly busy fundraising cycle for global opportunistic real estate, including a $4.3 billion fund for the Americas; it launched KREST, a private wealth fund for individual investors; and it bought Japan’s second largest REIT manager — now known as KJR Management.
On the individual asset side, KKR purchased The Exchange in San Francisco’s Mission Bay for $1 billion, in one of the largest office trades of the year. (Longfellow Real Estate Partners will now work with KKR to operate the property.) And on the debt side, KKR’s real estate credit team originated roughly $14.5 billion of loans across over 120 deals — quintupling its 2019 origination total. Phew!
“The game plan and the playbook was to leverage a best-in-class brand in KKR — that has a global footprint, with a very strong regional presence across alternative assets in the United States, Europe and Asia — to be a market participant that’s credible in the real estate space,” said Ralph Rosenberg. “There is brand recognition and comfort that we are credible partners and counterparties.”
