Ares Buying 36 Industrial Properties From EQT For $650M
Ares Management is once again snapping up a chunk of EQT Real Estate’s portfolio.
EQT is selling 36 warehouses encompassing 7.3M SF to Ares for more than $650M. To finance the acquisition, Ares is securing a $500M two-year floating-rate loan co-originated by Wells Fargo Bank, Barclays Capital Real Estate Inc. and Bank of America, according to Fitch Ratings.
Ares is expected to contribute more than $168M in equity into the deal.
The deal comes just four months after EQT sold a 4.2M SF, 33-property logistics portfolio, with Ares purchasing 23 of those properties, CoStar reported.
Both EQT and Ares have been among the most prolific buyers of industrial real estate in the past 24 months, each spending more than $9B on the sector and outpacing Blackstone by $1.5B in that period, according to CoStar.
The 36-warehouse portfolio sale involves 21 small to midsize distribution facilities, seven bulk warehouses and eight shallow-bay properties, according to CoStar.
The two largest properties in the portfolio are a 675K SF distribution center in Cherry Valley, Illinois, and a 636K SF facility in Zanesville, Ohio, according to Fitch. Both facilities are fully leased and are valued at $48.5M and $47M, respectively.
The portfolio is more than 95% leased with average gross rents at $5.78 per SF, according to Fitch.
On Tuesday, Ares Management also announced it was limiting redemptions on its Ares Strategic Income Fund to 5% compared to the 11.6% first-quarter requests it received, Financial Times reported.
Ares received $1.2B of redemption requests for its fund of more than $10B in the first three months of 2026. It redeemed more than $520M of those requests and honored all redemption requests made in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to FT.
Its strategic income fund owns loans and other securities worth in excess of $20B. The company said the redemption requests represented less than 1% of the fund’s more than 20,000 investors, FT reported.
“We have made this decision, as with all capital allocation decisions, aligned with what we believe are the best interests of the fund and all of our stakeholders, including the overwhelming majority of shareholders who remain invested,” Ares said in a shareholder letter obtained by FT.
Ares stock has fallen from $166 per share at the start of the year to the low $100s this month. The stock was trading around $107 per share midday Tuesday.
EQT also sold an 8.7M SF, 25-property portfolio to Artemis Real Estate Partners in November for $515M, Commercial Property Executive previously reported.
The portfolio sales come as industrial absorption ticked back up last year, totaling nearly 150M SF in 2025, with more than half of the market activity occurring in the second half of the year, according to CBRE. New construction did push the vacancy rate up 10 basis points to 6.7% by the fourth quarter, according to CBRE.
