Brookfield Reportedly Eyeing $10B Manufactured Housing Buy That Could Set New Record
Canadian investment giant Brookfield and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund are circling a potentially record-breaking deal.
Singapore’s GIC is in talks to sell its stake in manufactured homes landlord Yes Communities for more than $10B to Brookfield Asset Management. The sale would be the largest U.S. commercial exit for a sovereign wealth fund, and it would come at a time when a glut of new supply is testing the multifamily sector’s resilience.
The negotiations were first reported by The Financial Times on Sunday, with Bloomberg confirming the news, both citing anonymous sources. Brookfield declined Bisnow’s request for comment Monday morning.
Yes Communities is also working with Goldman Sachs on a potential initial public offering this year that could raise $1B or more for the firm, Bloomberg reported in December.
Denver-based Yes operates nearly 300 manufactured home developments and more than 55,000 housing sites across the United States, with a focus in the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. GIC and another unnamed institutional investor acquired a 71% equity interest in Yes in 2016, with the seller, San Francisco-based Stockbridge Capital Group, holding onto the remaining stake.
The talks between Brookfield and GIC are at an advanced stage, but there's no guarantee of a deal. If it closes, the transaction would be the largest ever commercial exit for a sovereign wealth fund and would cut GIC’s reliance on the U.S. real estate market while giving it a boost in liquidity, Diego Lopez, the managing director of research firm Global SWF, told Bloomberg.
GIC has continued to invest in U.S. assets — it partnered with Kite Realty Group in July to buy 921K SF in Florida retail malls — but it's also been active in Europe. It partnered with British Land on a $400M office development at 1 Broadgate in London and teamed up with German investor MEAG on a $1.6B data center investment fund.
Brookfield, an investment giant that oversees more than $1T in assets, including more than $270B in real estate, has been shuffling its portfolio as macroeconomic fortunes shift.
It paid $428M for a 3.6M SF Sun Belt industrial portfolio in July, but surrendered two office properties from a 12-asset suburban Washington, D.C., office portfolio in August. That same month, it handed Houston’s largest office complex to its mezzanine lender.
In July, it sold a 467-property net lease portfolio to Starwood Property Trust for $2.2B.
The cross-dollar funds are flowing despite ongoing global trade tensions and the tariff battle being waged from the White House. While Canadian shoppers can choose to buy local, global real estate funds are still being drawn to the massive deals available in the U.S.
Multifamily investors are betting that the wave of construction that began in the early days of the pandemic will find renters relatively fast, and the lack of new construction in the last two years means landlords will hold onto pricing power.
