Steve Reents
Deputy head of U.S. and U.S. chief investment officer at BGO
For BGO’s Steve Reents, market uncertainty means opportunity.
During his more than 20 years at BGO — both before and after the Bentall Kennedy merger with GreenOak Real Estate in 2019 — Reents has been in charge of the firm’s investment management and performance in office, industrial and residential assets.
Now, in his role as head of U.S. equity investments and U.S. chief investment officer, he’s looking to continue BGO’s active streak of acquiring and investing in assets across the board, despite the current swings in the market.
“There’s been a lot of volatility, a lot of uncertainty,” Reents said. “For us, we think that uncertainty begets opportunity. So we continue to be on offense, and we continue to look for new opportunities in this market.”
Overall, BGO has completed 53 investments totaling $5.9 billion across all of its national industrial strategies in the past three years, with 21 of those transactions, or approximately $2.5 billion, coming from BGO’s institutional logistics partnership with a large institutional investor.
Many of those transactions are in the data center realm. BGO controls or is invested in projects that have approximately $3 billion of data center potential, either as future developments or sales of sites planned for data center uses, according to Reents.
The firm has remained tactical on both pricing and market selection, especially when it comes to BGO’s U.S. core-plus fund, which launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and which covers the firm’s temperature-controlled logistics investments in cold storage.
As far as the year ahead, Reents said BGO is remaining focused on its core themes.
“I think thematically is how we think about where we’re going to invest across all of our different strategies,” Reents said. “We invest across data centers, cold storage, traditional logistics, even medical. … All of those industries are thematically strong for us. And we think acquisition versus development today continues to be very attractive for most of those segments.”
