After pressing pause on fundraising last year, asset managers have returned to their investors, soliciting $85B in capital in the first eight months of the year.

That puts private funds on track to raise $129B by the end of the year, up 38% from 2024, according to a report by Cushman & Wakefield.

In 2023, private capital fundraising totaled about $110B, down sharply from roughly $170B in 2022 — the decade’s peak. The following year, fundraising dropped further, slipping below $100B.

Among the largest funds to close this year are Brookfield Strategic Real Estate Partners V and Caryle Realty Partners X, which are now equipped with $16B and $9B, respectively. Both represented the largest real estate funds each firm has ever closed, according to Cushman.

The reversal indicates that private investors are expecting more market stability and are readying to deploy capital in the near future as a result.

“The conversations with institutional [limited partners] around real estate have really improved over the last six months. The tone now is much more open,” President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray said during Blackstone’s second-quarter earnings call. “The underlying facts of a lack of new supply, cost of capital coming down, that’s going to be the foundation for a recovery in real estate, and I think investors will want to go to it.”

The drawback in fundraising originally came as a result of the lack of capital deployment.

In the first few years following the pandemic, investors eagerly awaited distress to work its way through the system. Between the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2024, 594 real estate opportunity funds had been established, Bisnow previously reported.

But with elevated interest rates and banks continuing to extend and pretend, owners managed to cling to their properties. Prices have been slow to reset, and few transactions have taken place.

In the first half of the year, 58% of commercial real estate investment firms said that it had become more difficult to raise capital, according to a survey commissioned by Agora, a real estate investment management platform.

Still, that didn’t take investment managers out of the game, as 44% of respondents said they had already shifted their plans in 2025 to new asset classes and regions in response to market volatility. Another 35% were considering pivots at the time.

Debt funds in particular have attracted increased interest. Private debt funds targeting North American CRE have raised more than $20B so far in 2025, according to Cushman’s report. This year is set to become the second strongest on record for such vehicles, behind 2021.

Among those is Blackstone’s $8B Real Estate Debt Strategies V, which closed in March. The vehicle ties with its previous iteration as the largest debt fund ever closed globally, according to Preqin.

Most debt funds have plans to invest in a broad range of property types as a wave of debt maturities looms, according to Cushman. Private funds have already sprung into action, buying debt early, before assets hit the market.