Ben Brown

Deploying roughly $5 billion is impressive in a good year … but in a cruddy one like 2023 it’s the sign of a true powerhouse.

“The last year we were probably more active than I would have anticipated on three fronts — the acquisition side, the disposition side, and fundraising,” said Ben Brown, the recently anointed head of the Americas for Brookfield.

To wit, last summer, Brookfield put down $800 million to buy up 2,149 apartments previously owned by Veritas Investments, formerly San Francisco’s largest residential landlord, across some 75 buildings — instantly making Brookfield one of the biggest landlords in the Bay Area. They also hoovered up 1,500 student housing units around the University of Central Florida. “That was a really great asset, but a broken capital structure,” Brown said. “They needed liquidity to meet redemptions.”

That’s sort of what Brookfield will be looking at as it raises another opportunistic fund going into the rest of the year: healthy real estate with bad financing. The details of the fund are still murky, but they’ve already closed $8 billion. “It’s one of the best environments we have for investing in the last decade,” Brown said. “The fundamentals in the U.S. show pretty strong top-line revenue growth in all our businesses.”

And just as Brookfield put money out in the market, it took a lot back, with $6.5 billion in sales. The biggest by size and price was a 6.5 million-square-foot office portfolio in India that traded for $1.3 billion (Brookfield’s office portfolio in India is massive — some 50 million square feet). Stateside, the most notable was the sale of The Diplomat hotel in Hollywood, Fla., to Trinity Investments and Credit Suisse Asset Management for $835 million, the third-highest price ever paid nationally for a single hotel.

Of course, Brookfield’s triumphs came with stumbles, too. In Downtown Los Angeles, 777 Tower has been a constant headache (it went into default in 2023 and came tantalizingly close to a sale last month only to see the deal fall through), as has Gas Company Tower (a foreclosure sale is scheduled for June) and EY Plaza (in receivership).

But at the same time, Brookfield did 5.1 million square feet of office leasing in the U.S.

“Manhattan West is the gift that keeps on giving,” Brown said of that project. “Now that all the retail, hotel, residential [is there] it really does become its own little neighborhood. The High Line connection has been a huge natural benefit. … Rents are up, and desirability gets better every day.”