BREIT Raises $1B More Than Investors Redeem, Reversing 3-Year Outflow Trend
Blackstone’s flagship real estate fund attracted $7.2B in new capital across 2025 and quadrupled its internal rate of return year-over-year.
The investment giant’s Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust raised $1B more than it saw in outflows last year.
The year’s fundraise is the first time since September 2022 that BREIT recorded net inflows, and it comes after the fund returned less than 2% in 2024 and lost 1% of its value the year prior.
“BREIT’s net positive flows reflect its highly differentiated performance since inception,” a Blackstone spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “BREIT remains exceptionally well-positioned amid the cyclical recovery in real estate, supported by its differentiated portfolio, which includes its data center company, QTS and its massive logistics platform.”
BREIT last year had an 8% IRR, reversing a two-year trend of lackluster results and putting the fund's performance roughly in line with its 9% annualized return since its inception in 2017.
Blackstone’s management described BREIT’s “strong performance” as separate from the “limited appreciation in aggregate” that the firm saw across its $319B real estate portfolio, which includes $54.3B in BREIT, in a year-end report filed Feb. 27 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Blackstone acquired data center developer QTS in a $10B deal in 2021 and has poured billions of dollars into growing the business, including a $3B payment to the firm’s founder and former CEO as part of a buyout last year.
The fund’s 2025 performance was driven by strength in its three core sectors: data centers, multifamily and industrial, which make up roughly 90% of its holdings. BREIT cited strong leasing activity across its data center platform as a key driver of returns.
BREIT, which drove $4.7B in realizations last year, also was the primary driver behind a $286M increase in fee-related performance revenues. Blackstone Property Partners, its largest platform composed of dozens of funds that are used to invest in real estate, holds roughly $8B more capital than BREIT.
The nontraded REIT came under pressure in 2023 after a deluge of redemption requests triggered quarterly caps that built up a backlog that took until March 2024 to clear. Blackstone said it took an average of four months to fulfill redemption requests during the 15-month period where a cap was in place.
The fund's 2025 performance beat the 2.3% return of the FTSE Nareit All Equity REITs Index but lagged the more than 16% return on the S&P 500.
Blackstone and other nontraded REITS have fulfilled roughly $56B worth of redemptions and largely erased the sectorwide backlog, with the exception of Starwood Capital Group, which was working through nearly $1B in requests at the end of August. MacKenzie Realty Capital offered to buy up to 150,000 in SREIT shares in October at a roughly 22% discount.
