Blackstone Group LP has reportedly agreed to purchase an office property portfolio in Australia from GE Capital Real Estate in a deal worth around$300 million, according to several news reports.
Blackstone will be completing the deal within the next week, reports Bloomberg. The deal includes seven office properties located across Sydney and Melbourne. No further detail about the deal is available as the talks are still private and nothing has been finalized yet.
GE Capital Real Estate is selling away most of its tangible assets as it hopes to adopt insurance and lending as its core business. More recently, it sold another seven properties to Mirvac Group for around $527 million.
The acquisition will mark Blackstone's second investment foray in the Australian commercial real estate market. Earlier in July, Blackstone purchased the Greensborough Plaza Mall in Melbourne from Lend Lease Group for around $333 million. The acquisition is a part of its expansion plans into the Asia Pacific region. The company particularly wants to snap up low quality properties in Australia, redevelop them and sell them for a better price.
The private equity firm had recently announced that it wanted to extend its services to the Asian region as well. According to the Wall Street Journal, the firm plans to raise funds worth more than $4 billion to invest in China and other Asian countries. Though the exact amount of the fund is not known, the sum is twice the value of what Blackstone had initially planned to raise.
Blackstone is currently the largest single family home owner in the U.S. The company has '$60 billion in total assets that are under management' and '$10 billion in capital available for investments.'
"A portion of these assets, valued at over $5 billion, is made up of 31,000 homes in 13 U.S. markets," according to a feature at CNBC News.
Check out a video below where Jonathan Gray, global head of Blackstone Group discusses how the company is benefiting from global real estate investments:
