Ben Brown

In July 2025, Brookfield’s Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) reached a deal to sell its net-lease real estate operating platform called Fundamental Income Properties, with 467 properties across 44 states, to Starwood Property Trust for $2.2 billion.

The deal is indicative of the deep waters in which the New York-based alternative asset manager and its real estate chief, Ben Brown, frolic.

Last year’s aggregate numbers also underscore the water’s depth. The company ended 2025 with more than $1 trillion in assets under management, and it netted nearly $2.4 billion in income.

Also, BAM sold $17 billion in assets and acquired $18 billion. It financed a further $40 billion in deals, and funded $5.5 billion in loans, according to the company. Those sales ran the globe, too. There was a $2.5 billion senior living assets deal in Australia, a $1.4 billion housing trade in Spain, and a $410 million hospitality deal in India.

The acquisitions span asset classes, too. That includes the $1.2 billion take-private in February 2026 of Peakstone, a real estate investment trust focused on industrial outdoor storage. And it includes the $4.5 billion December pact with a Singapore partner to acquire Australia’s largest self-storage firm.

“Believe it or not, it was our most active year across our real estate business ever,” Brown said, noting that BAM overcame general economic volatility at the start of the year to finish strong. “All in all a very busy year — productive, I’d say, on both a global scale but also on a local scale. I think it sets us up to be pretty active and opportunistic this year.”

BAM was indeed busy in its New York home base. The company signed 4 million square feet of office leases in New York, including 2.1 million in its Brookfield Place — representing about 40 percent of all of Lower Manhattan’s office leasing for 2025. Farther uptown, the company finished leasing up 660 Fifth Avenue and Lever House at 390 Park Avenue.

These latter deals included taking rents of $300 a square foot, among the highest office rents ever achieved in the U.S. Brown wasn’t surprised.

“I just think we’ve had to relearn the elasticity of rents that tenants are willing to pay,” he said.