Blackstone Group reached an agreement to buy U.S. industrial warehouse properties from Singapore-based logistics provider GLP for $18.7 billion, the companies announced.
The portfolio includes about 1,300 properties and 179 million square feet of urban logistics assets. The companies said it was the largest private real estate transaction globally. Blackstone said it nearly doubles the size of its U.S. industrial footprint.
The biggest single tenant is Amazon.
“Logistics is our highest conviction global investment theme today, and we look forward to building on our existing portfolio to meet the growing e-commerce demand,” said Ken Caplan the global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate.
Other big tenants include Walmart, Adidas, and L’Oreal.
Blackstone said it was splitting the assets between two funds, with its global opportunistic BREP strategy taking 115 million square feet for $13.4 billion and Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust taking 64 million square feet for $5.3 billion.
Blackstone is looking for $5 billion for its newest real estate fund. The company, in April, said its assets under management surpassed $512 billion.
Blackstone said, including the GLP deal, it has bought more than 930 million square feet of logistics property around the world since 2010. In March 2018, the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust bought the 22 million square foot Canyon Industrial Portfolio for about $1.8 billion. Then in May 2018, Blackstone Property Partners and Ivanhoe Cambridge closed a deal for the Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust for $3.8 billion. Blackstone agreed to buy a portfolio of warehouses from Harvard University’s endowment for about $950 million last fall.
GLP had become the second-largest logistics investor in the U.S. in recent years, behind only Prologis. The company said it would continue to have holdings in the U.S. but would focus on Asia.
Blackstone’s advisers were Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. GLP’s advisers were Citigroup, Eastdil Secured and Goldman Sachs.