Blackstone Global Real Estate co-Head Kathleen McCarthy is leaving the firm to pursue new opportunities.

McCarthy will leave at the end of the year, she wrote on LinkedIn. Her departure means that Nadeem Meghji will become sole global head of real estate.

"Leading Blackstone Real Estate has been one of the great privileges of my career — fun, challenging, and deeply rewarding," McCarthy wrote on LinkedIn. "I’m so proud of what we’ve built together through an extraordinary period of growth and transformation."

McCarthy has been at Blackstone for 15 years, joining from Goldman Sachs’ real estate investment business. During that time, she has overseen the firm’s real estate business growth from $115B in assets under management to $320B today.

That period took in the tail end of the low-interest-rate-driven boom, the tumult of the coronavirus pandemic and the downturn that began in 2022 when interest rates rose sharply.

That latter period included something almost unprecedented in Blackstone’s real estate history: a slight decline in assets under management.

McCarthy was real estate chief operating officer until 2018. When Jon Gray stepped up to become Blackstone’s president, she became global co-head alongside real estate Chief Investment Officer Ken Caplan.

When Caplan became overall Blackstone global co-CIO in 2024, Meghji moved up from his role as head of North American real estate to partner with McCarthy.

Blackstone called the bottom of the market in early 2024, and the sector has improved gradually since.

“Because of our expectation on rates, we think that real estate values are bottoming out,” McCarthy said in an interview with Bisnow in March 2024. “But that doesn’t mean it will be a V-shaped recovery.”

In the nine months to the end of September, Blackstone sold $16.9B in real estate, similar to the $16.7B it had sold by the same point last year.

McCarthy’s next move will be closely watched by the industry. There is a pipeline of former Blackstone heads of real estate starting new ventures.

One alumnus, Chad Pike, launched a new fund management business called Makarora in 2023. Last month, the firm agreed to take listed logistics owner Plymouth Industrial private for $2.1B alongside Ares.