Blackstone’s love affair with the industrial sector continued at the turn of the new year, with the U.S. giant buying a £200M portfolio, part of a £1B 2024 UK spree.

Blackstone’s Indurent UK logistics platform acquired a portfolio of 18 last-mile logistics assets totalling 2M SF from fellow U.S. investor PGIM Real Estate. The assets are primarily located around Manchester, Birmingham, Reading and Leeds.

The deal, completed at the end of 2024, means that Blackstone spent about £1B on UK industrial last year.

That included £600M of spending on operational assets and £400M spent on forward-funding developments.

In July, Blackstone launched Indurent, its latest platform for hoovering up and managing industrial assets. The division was created by the merger of Industrials REIT, which it took private for £511M, and the industrial assets of St Modwen, which it took private for £1.3B in 2021.

Indurent has a 27M SF portfolio of industrial assets ranging from small urban facilities to larger big-box schemes. Indurent Chief Executive Julian Carey said that the company wants to buy more assets and also plans to develop 2M SF a year from its land bank.

Blackstone said UK e-commerce penetration is expected to rise by 6% by 2027. At the same time, supply of new logistics assets is forecast to drop 57% in 2024 and 2025. That is because new starts are 54% below 2022 levels.

Blackstone built up and then either sold or recapitalised two huge European logistics platforms in the last cycle. Logicor, which owns and manages big-box logistics assets, was bought by the China Investment Corp. for £11B in 2017, and light-industrial and last-mile specialist Mileway was recapitalised at a valuation of £18B in 2022.