BREIT Logs Best Performance In 3 Years As It Rides AI Demand Wave
Blackstone’s flagship real estate fund quadrupled its performance in 2025 compared to the prior year, notching its strongest performance since 2022.
Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, commonly known as BREIT, provided an 8.1% gain to investors in 2025 and ended the year with more than $54B in assets, according to the firm, bolstered by investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The solid performance in 2025 tracked with the broader recovery across commercial real estate from a cycle low that weighed on BREIT returns and led fund redemptions to be limited from 2022 through March 2024.
BREIT gained 8.4% in 2022 before having its worst-ever performance in 2023, posting a 0.5% loss then bouncing back modestly to a 2% gain in 2024 as capital markets emerged from the pandemic-era freeze. The fund has an annualized return rate of 9.3% since its inception in 2017.
“BREIT has generated highly differentiated results for its shareholders over the last nine years, both in terms of performance and liquidity,” a Blackstone spokesperson said in an email. “BREIT is now benefitting from the beginning of the cyclical recovery in real estate as well as the powerful value creation in its data center platform, QTS.”
Blackstone paid roughly $6.5B for QTS Realty Trust, a major data center operator in North America and Europe, in a deal that took the firm private at a $10B valuation including debt in 2021.
Blackstone has ridden the explosion of data center demand driven by AI to grow QTS from a development pipeline around $1B at the time of its acquisition to $25B by the middle of last year. Blackstone reportedly paid $3B to buy out QTS founder and CEO Chad Williams’ share of the firm last year after deciding that new leadership was needed for the development firm’s next wave of growth.
The growth of QTS has helped lift data centers to 21% of BREIT’s portfolio at the end of 2025, just behind the fund’s 22% exposure to industrial assets. Traditional multifamily investments accounted for 19% of holdings while student housing, affordable rentals and single-family homes made up around a quarter of the fund’s holdings combined.
BREIT, which is privately held and geared toward individual investors, outperformed the public REIT sector in 2025, with the FTSE Nareit All Equity REIT Index returning 2.3%. But it lagged the nearly 18% return from the S&P 500 and more than 20% gain of the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100.
Investment bank Robert A. Stanger & Co. estimates that nontraded REITs excluding Blackstone averaged a 1.5% return in the first nine months of 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported.
