After making its largest-ever bet on Japan by acquiring a stake in a Tokyo commercial complex earlier this year, Brookfield plans to pursue more deals across a range of opportunities in Asia’s busiest real estate market, according to a senior executive with the Canadian investment giant. Watch the full recording>>
Brookfield is looking to build further on a total of $1.6 billion it committed in February to pick up a roughly 30 percent interest in Maguro Gajoen and ownership of two Japanese logistics projects, said Andrew Burych, the group’s head of East Asia real estate, in an interview at Wednesday’s Mingtiandi Tokyo Forum.
With $152 billion in Asia Pacific assets under management across all business lines, including $30 billion in India alone, Brookfield’s strategy in Japan has been incremental as the company sought to put together a strong local team with boots on the ground and ears attuned to potential deals.
“It’s a function of really two things,” Burych told the audience of over 200 delegates at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo. “One is we’ve now had time to establish our business here. And that’s very important, having a local presence on the ground, building that network over time, building trust with local partners. That really leads to transactions. The second is the macro backdrop of what’s going on in Japan.”
Learning the Japanese Way
Burych pointed to a rare mix of factors attracting investment into Japan, where real estate deal volume jumped 23 percent year-on-year to $23 billion in the third quarter to lead all APAC markets, according to JLL. The drivers include a stable environment, the weaker yen, rising female participation in the workforce and a parade of corporates setting up shop in Tokyo.
Andrew Burych, managing partner and head of east and southeast Asia real estate at Brookfield
“Inflation is helping push up rents,” Burych said. “You’re starting to see that rent growth come through and the currency has fallen to a place where it’s pretty interesting to invest. So you’ve got all of these things happening at the same time.”
Brookfield made its first investment in Asia’s second-biggest economy in 2021 with a low-profile cold storage development project. The episode gave the Toronto-based group insights into the Japanese way of doing business, such as the “follow-through factor” with partners.
“That was very important to sort of help show and build that trust in the system,” Burych said. “The next was the lease-up. You know, typically in North America, we would have looked to do a pre-commitment on the lease. That’s just not the market in Japan. And part of that is a lot of Japanese corporates want to see the physical space ready to be occupied.”
Friendly Approach
Brookfield stepped up its ambitions with the partial acquisition of Maguro Gajoen, a 1.5 million square foot (139,355 square metre) complex with a 60-key wedding-led hotel and office towers said to be 90 percent occupied by Amazon for use as the tech titan’s Japanese headquarters.
The Canadian group’s biggest-ever Japan buy came as real estate acquisitions by foreign investors in the country hit a first-half record of JPY 1.14 trillion ($7.76 billion) in 2025, according to CBRE data. In addition, US private equity firms have been backing buyouts of Japanese companies with an eye towards unlocking unrealised value from real estate assets on their balance sheets, as in the case of KKR’s $4 billion take-private of systems developer Fuji Soft.
Burych recognised the appeal of engaging with Japanese corporates to help them carve out real estate assets from their core businesses — though he hinted that Brookfield would employ a softer touch than what one might expect from a hard-charging PE firm.
“There’s a lot of interest in these hostile public deals that are happening, and that’s just not the approach Brookfield’s going to take,” he said. “We’re going to take a very friendly approach to working with corporates. We want to be a partner to them, a solution provider. So if a corporate is looking to divest assets, we’re happy to have a conversation with them.”
An Interview in Pictures
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