Barry Sternlicht

During the first few months of 2024 alone, Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group has made headlines in all the right places. 

In January, it launched Starwood Digital Ventures, a new platform dedicated to the firm’s data centers strategy. Its investment in the space now hovers around $8 billion, with 1.5 gigawatts of development either complete or underway. It also took that conviction in the sector overseas a month later, investing $850 million in Echelon Data Centres — one of the U.K.’s largest data center developers — to aid the company’s expansion. 

Also this year, sticking to Sternlicht’s hospitality roots, the firm snapped up a portfolio of 10 U.K. hotels from Edwardian Group in an off-market transaction. The deal brought Starwood’s European hotel portfolio to 10,000 rooms across 47 hotels. Not too shabby!

Back on U.S. shores, Sternlicht has pulled no punches when it comes to the ongoing market dislocation and distress, predicting at the start of the year in January $1 trillion of losses for the office sector (ouch), and taking Jerome Powell and his Fed crew off his holiday card list (we assume) for the “arcane” rate hikes that have caused said bedlam for the commercial real estate industry. 

When interest rates went up, and the chips were down for most, however, Starwood got to work. 

Part of the beauty of Starwood’s business model is its diversity, which allows the firm to stay in the game in good times and bad. Case in point: While special servicing loan transfer volumes skyrocketed via rate environment distress, Starwood increased special servicing to nearly $100 billion of CMBS at its captive servicer, LNR, in the past year. It also leaned into LNR’s extensive experience in reworking troubled loans to launch Starwood Solutions in November. The new vertical offers myriad services, including asset and portfolio valuations, restructuring consulting, and collateral management and surveillance.  

While it was at it, in February 2024, Starwood created a middle-market lending business to capitalize on the tumbleweeds blowing in the middle-market lending sector as a result of last year’s regional banking crisis. 

The firm attributed “sizable gains” in its portfolio this past year to its 15,000-unit Florida affordable multifamily portfolio. In Miami Beach, it broke ground in April on the less affordable — with some units going for $13.7 million — condominium project The Perigon.

Perhaps as the cherry on top of it all, Starwood almost broke the internet when it nabbed industry vet Jonathan Pollack from Blackstone as its new president.