Blackstone co-founder, chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman
Blackstone’s real estate business continued to recover in 2025, posting an 8 percent rise in revenue to $3.5 billion, as the artificial intelligence boom delivered a boost to the private equity titan’s data centre investments.
The Manhattan-based firm’s real estate assets under management grew 1 percent to $319.3 billion with inflows of $8.3 billion in the fourth quarter and $25.5 billion for the year, according to results announced Thursday. Blackstone said 75 percent of its real estate portfolio is in data centres, logistics and rental housing — sectors it sees supported by long-term fundamentals — offsetting headwinds in segments including life science offices and UK student housing.
Blackstone’s US-based QTS data centre business was the largest single driver of real estate investment returns in 2025, according to the NYSE-listed group, which acquired one of Asia Pacific’s biggest data centre platforms, AirTrunk, in late 2024 in a $16.1 billion deal.
“Our focus on investing at massive scale in the buildout of digital and energy infrastructure continues to create significant value for our investors,” said chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman.
BREIT Bounceback
On Blackstone’s earnings call, president and chief operating officer Jonathan Gray said institutional owners were “much more open” to real estate than they were two years ago, when the company’s property revenue plunged 50 percent and withdrawals from the flagship BREIT fund dominated headlines.
Blackstone president and chief operating officer Jonathan Gray
The non-listed BREIT, which holds a 35 percent stake in QTS Data Centers, delivered a net return of 8.1 percent last year for its largest share class, or nearly three times the public REIT index, according to Blackstone. The improvement came after BREIT posted a 2 percent return in 2024 and a 0.5 percent loss in 2023.
Real estate deal volume is likely to pick up as values start to recover and sellers become more motivated, said Gray, who is widely considered the architect of Blackstone’s global real estate push.
“It is still very low relative to historic levels,” he told analysts. “And again, this is an asset class that is not going away. You know, real estate has fallen pretty far out of favour. And yet hard assets, apartments, logistics, beachfront hotels, they are definitely going to have long-term demand. I would say I think the focus for us initially will be more on the opportunistic side. But over time here, I think you will see more and more transaction activity.”
Turning to Asia, Gray described Japan as a market with “long-term stickiness” and the next-biggest geographic target for Blackstone, outside of the US.
Last year saw Blackstone complete its $2.6 billion acquisition of the Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho commercial complex, marking the largest-ever real estate acquisition by a foreign investor in Japan. The firm ended the year with another mega-deal, the purchase of a warehouse facility in Tokyo for $641 million in Japan’s biggest industrial transaction announced in 2025.
“We do have an investment base in Hong Kong and Singapore,” Gray said. “We are spreading out around the globe. But it continues to be a US-dominated business, with Japan now a strong number two for us.”
AUM Tops $1.2T
Blackstone’s full-year revenue rose 9.2 percent to $14.5 billion as net income jumped 11.2 percent to $6 billion, with $3 billion attributable to shareholders.
Assets under management climbed 13 percent to $1.27 trillion, including fee-earning AUM of $921.7 billion, up 11 percent. Total inflows amounted to $71.5 billion in the fourth quarter and $239.4 billion for the year.
Blackstone’s third Asian opportunistic real estate fund, BREP Asia III, stood at $8.2 billion in committed capital, nearly unchanged from the end of the third quarter and still well shy of the 2022-vintage vehicle’s $9 billion target.
Bloomberg reported this week that Blackstone was nearing a deal to become the largest shareholder in embattled builder New World Development, but the Hong Kong giant said Thursday that no agreement had been reached.
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