John Carrafiell, Sonny Kalsi and Amy Price

“We don’t stand on the street corner and pound our chest, but we’re a top five player in U.S. industrial and a top 10 player globally,” John Carrafiell said.

BGO may be humble, but the firm had a cracking year across sectors and strategies. Let’s start with industrial, where Carrafiell said it saw “phenomenal” leasing activity toward the end of 2025.

“The tariff announcements weren’t good news for industrial, but from September we saw tenants coming back quite seriously and intensely leasing space — and that was in Europe as well as the U.S.,” Carrafiell said.

Fast forward to 2026, and BGO also launched its U.S. value-add industrial strategy with the purchase of two assets in Atlanta, the goal being to implement capital improvements and leasing programs at those buildings to bring them to stabilization within three years.

Generally speaking, “We’re really excited about this vintage because there are a huge range of opportunities which we’re finding very attractive and, at the same time, we’re able to buy well below replacement costs, which we were not able to do for the last five years,” Carrafiell said.

Industrial is only one reason for BGO to celebrate the past year-plus. It just announced that its parent company, Sun Life Financial, had entered into an agreement with multifamily investment firm Bell Partners to combine its and BGO’s businesses under the BGO name.

“We’re a very active player in multifamily, but we didn’t have a vertical capability, and Bell Partners has an outstanding track record,” Carrafiell said. “We were really excited to progress that transaction during the course of 2025, and closing it was a big highlight.”

BGO also closed its value-add BentallGreenOak Asia Fund IV at $4.6 billion, marking its largest fundraise to date. Then, there’s its AI and data science strategy, which is firing on all cylinders and becoming an even more formidable competitive edge for the firm with each iteration.

“We’re now on Version 5.0 of our model, and it’s become even more predictive in its ability to forecast, with a five-year forward-looking view, what are going to be the top-performing markets in the U.S. in various sectors like industrial and multifamily,” Carrafiell said. “We believe we’re ahead of everyone else in the sector in the sophistication and predictive capability of our model.”

While Nvidia chips don’t replace boots on the ground — “We still make investments the old-fashioned way and pound the pavement,” Carrafiell said — it gives BGO an edge. “And, in this business, that edge can create outperformance.”