Chris Lee, Justin Pattner and Matt Salem

KKR celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, and there’s plenty that’s golden about the firm.

It had another stellar run of savvy market plays and major headlines this past year, including the $10 billion it reportedly secured this past April to launch an AI infrastructure development company. More generally, the firm has remained active across equity and credit, actively deploying capital across its high-conviction sectors.

“We feel like our brand, our team, and where we’re spending our time is really resonating,” Chris Lee said. “The work that we’ve done around which themes to pursue and which areas to focus on has put us in a good spot in our equity business. Then, the credit side of the business is where our brand shines the most, because we’ve got real breadth of capital and we can do everything from senior loans to more opportunistic loans and everything in between.”

In 2025, KKR’s U.S. real estate equity platform invested roughly $1.5 billion of equity, representing approximately $3.1 billion of gross asset value.

Describing the past year, Lee said KKR was busy “deploying through dislocation,” including $400 million of equity to the senior housing space alone, equating to $1 billion of total equity invested in the sector since 2024. It also sold roughly $2.5 billion of senior housing.

“Being able to return capital on $2.5 billion worth of senior housing sales was a highlight for the equity side of our business,” Lee said. “We owned this portfolio through the downturn, really took care of our tenants and really were stewards of these assets, and then we’re able to drive a successful outcome for our investors.”

Industrial and multifamily were also busy spots, with the firm snapping up a 2.5 million-square-foot Class A infill industrial portfolio in southwest Atlanta for $340 million and three Dallas apartment buildings for $250 million. Speaking of Dallas, on the credit side of the business, “We love all of our clients, but I’m a Dallas native, and we made a loan on Highland Park Village, which was a highlight for me,” Lee said, referring to a high-end shopping complex in the city.

KKR Real Estate Credit was also busy growing its capital base in 2025— to $44.9 billion in assets under management, an increase of $2 billion versus 2024. The firm remains one of the largest investors in junior tranches of commercial mortgage-backed securities and has invested more than $3.5 billion in real estate securities as of year-end 2025.

“We’ve been very active as a lender,” Lee said. “We really leaned in after Liberation Day, and were able to capture some of the excess spread in the market. We run into environments when there’s fear.”