Blackstone’s BREIT defence

Amid all the crypto excitement we missed an update from another one of the more legitimately interesting stories out there: The Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust has published its third-quarter results.

Last month we published a big post exploring BREIT’s rampant growth, its growing importance to Blackstone, the increasingly wild divergence between its performance (up ca. 9.3 per cent this year) and publicly listed real estate trusts (down about 28 per cent in 2022) and the outlook at a time of rising rates and weakening property markets. It’s a subject that is getting more and more attention.

Unsurprisingly, Blackstone thinks all this chatter is overdone, so in addition to the 10-Q it also released a Q&A with Nadeem Meghji, the company’s head of Americas real estate, which attempts to address all these issues. The tl;dr is that Blackstone is great, they love BREIT, and so should you.

BREIT has delivered extraordinary returns to investors since inception nearly 6 years ago. We could not be more proud of the portfolio we have built. Demonstrating our conviction in BREIT, Blackstone employees have over $1 billion of their own money invested in the company, including more than $300 million invested by senior executives over the last four months.

The Q&A is worth reading to see how Blackstone’s rationale for why it is doing so much better than publicly traded real estate, its explanation for outflows (driven mostly by wealthy people in Asia, it seems) and how values its real estate.

Their emphasis below:

BREIT updates its valuations monthly to reflect what’s happening in the private real estate market and has those values reviewed by an independent third party.

Higher interest rates have led to materially higher cap rates (lower valuation multiples) which have negatively impacted valuations. BREIT’s valuations reflect this change, and we have increased our assumed rental housing and industrial exit cap rates and discount rates by 14% and 6% YTD, respectively.

At the same time, BREIT’s strong cash flow growth, stable income and value increases from our interest rate hedges have more than offset the negative valuation impact from materially higher cap rates.

Our 5.4% assumed rental housing and industrial exit cap rate is 160bps above the 10Y treasury yield of 3.8%.

So far this year, BREIT has sold $2B of real estate at an average 8% premium to the carrying value that BREIT ascribed to these assets.

Our assumed rental housing and industrial exit cap rate today is higher than many non-traded REIT peers, who have not moved their valuation assumptions as meaningfully.

For completists, in an accompanying video you can also watch Blackstone president Jonathan Gray talk up the prospects of BREIT despite a “challenging time” for markets. It’s almost as if the vehicle has become essential to Blackstone’s financial results…

The third-quarter report and a monthly portfolio update indicates that not everyone is convinced though. After a ferocious stretch of growth since being established, BREIT’s net asset value dipped to $69.5bn at the end of October, from $70.4bn at the end of September. (Its total assets were valued at $144.9bn at the time).

Outflows — in the form of repurchases of investor shares — have slowed since the summer, but will continue to be “closely watched as the fund matures in the face of a less constructive backdrop,” as Jefferies analysts noted in a report this morning.

The question is still just how sticky money in BREIT will prove if the US real estate market does crack and Blackstone is forced into marking down the value of its holdings. That could made its performance suddenly look a lot less fabulous. We suspect some people at 345 Park Avenue are praying for a Fed pivot.