Blackstone’s $ 17 billion’s property hand does not give up on its office bets

After years of falling that left us empty, the offices left us, Black stone See President Jon Gray Sector as mature for new bets. Its real estate merchants are preparing to collect a share of 50 ups in Midtown Manhattan, which is the strongest signal, so far to see the market prepared for the abduction.
In the meantime, the executives who run commercial mortgage trust still sorts old office loans that have gone bad. Blackstone Mortgage Trust Inc. In the last quarter of last year, he drove more than a billion dollars of debt, mostly tied to offices.
And Reit – known for her leg, Bxmt – still has more than $ 1 billion problematic loans in her approximately $ 17 billion. The reminder is that real estate recovery is uneven and stopped.
“We will definitely see smaller offices in the portfolio while we are going forward here,” BXMT CEO Katie Keenan, 13-year-old Veteranka Blackstone, told analysts last month. The Foundation has just released its first year -long net loss since Blackstone took over it in 2012. A large part of the loss came from recognizing that BXMT cannot fully raise some loans.
The BXMT shares ended last year for some 50% of their Pandemic Peak, release about $ 2 billion in market values before recovering in February. It’s just a small part of a wider company that manages $ 1.1 trillion, but the health of the lender is intertwined with parts of Blackstone. Several borrowers – like the Crown Resorts Australian company – manages the world’s largest commercial real estate owner.
Blackstone emphasized that the offices are less than 2% of their capital portfolio in the US. BXMT, on the other hand, was filled with office loans-more than 50% of its portfolio on the very beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. Through writing, repayment and taking the keys of buildings, it decreased about a third. More than half of BXMT’s office loans are on the list or weakened.
“The loan exposure to the office was a great overcome in their stock for about two years,” said Harsh Hemnane, a senior analyst of a real estate company Green Street, from BXMT. “Now we see that this will get rid of it, but certain things will take time to play.”
Short sellers like Carson Block He warned that Reit would be tied to the fall of commercial property. Block discovered A bet against BXMT at the end of 2023, and confidence reduced its dividend less than a year later. Block did not respond to a request for comment on the status of his short position, although this week he told Bloomberg Television that his company was “happy” his thesis played. Still, Block said he was less sure of a short case for a commercial property that goes forward with regard to the uncertainty of the rates. Short positions in BXMT have halved to about 8.4% of the remaining shares in the last year, according to data composed by S&P Global.
Bxmt says his wealth rises because the recovery of real estate is collecting momentum.
“A year ago, we said that DNA real estate values and that just happened,” Bxmt said in a statement E -later. Confidence is aggressively moving in the schedule of liquidity almost records in new loans, and office loans are throwing money, the statement said. More than half of the repayment in about the last year arrived from office loans.
Still, investors have a small appetite for everyone except the best offices. Confidence is working on sale of an insurance commitment of loan – basically bonds made up of loans that originated – forFor the first time since 2021. The deal will mainly support housing complexes, catering and industrial properties, which is a shift from the previous closure mainly with office buildings.
The Blackstone Real Estate team was a bull on office renters in the main city areas ten years ago, according to people who are familiar with this issue. Executive director Steve Schwarzman told the associates that the buildings could still be profitable even if they were half -busy, the other person said.
But there was little prediction that would bring a coid-19 pandemic. The values have fallen on average by more than 75% of the top for most of the buildings in New York, according to Stijn van Niewawerburg, a professor at the Columbia University Business School.
And BXMT carried a much higher exposure to the global office than peers. While Blackstone Units had more than half of its portfolio related to office loans at the beginning of the pandemia Apollo Global Management Inc i KKR & Co. reported concentrations below 30%.
Analysts questioned whether they should confidence to book more for potential credit losses. Bxmt set aside about $ 734 million to calculate the loan losses at the end of 2024. This is more than $ 125 million at the end of 2021.
Hemnati, analyst, Green Street, said that the loan loss reserves are still not large enough.
“We still think that their CECL reserves do not fully account for the losses they could experience,” he said, referring to the accounting term for short -term loan losses. “But the gap between the losses we expect and their reserves are narrowing very quickly.”
In a statement, Trust said he used a cautious access to his reserves, “confirmed by the fact that our resolution was generally more favorable than our loss reserves implied.”
He solved $ 1.6 billion in damaged loans in 2024 above the wearing of value.
Warehouse Queen
BXMT is working to clean the contract less than non-not-not-not-in-the-trailer, as the office market is slowly recovering. In New York, for example, Blackstone put an additional capital in the Falchi building, which has a loan of $ 200 million with a BXMT that has not been returned to maturity, according to people who are familiar with the issue. Located in the industrial part of the queens near the recycling plant and construction suppliers, a warehouse that was rented by renting the Uber space and a taxi commission of New York.
BXMT also resorted to some financial engineering to buy a lender time. Last year, trust agreed that certain borns delay paying cash in exchange for higher interest and more fees. Some of the changes include payment in Nature, which means that interest payments are delayed and instead add to the principal. Such maneuvers are rarely a good sign for the borrower. Still, they represented a small part of the BXMT interest revenue – only 1% to one extent – last year, according to confidence.
Confidence gained multiple funding rooms. Last year, in order to avoid violating the Agreement on their own BXMT loans, the executives persuaded banks to loosen the debt limit. He said the agreement was “generally standard” among its peers.
Blackstone’s wider real estate borrowing unit, operated by a 14-year-old Tim Johnson veteran, has gone through some changes to the staff. Mike Nash-Koji was facing real estate jobs and was known for his compositions during complex training-he brought to the hand of Hedge Fund in 2021, and recently retired, although he remained on the BXMT Committee. Jonathan Pollack, former head of Blackstone for real estate, left last year to become President of Starwood Capital Group.
In an invitation with analysts last month, BXMT painted a picture of the company firmly in mode of operation. But there is still work to do before the unit fully exploits more attractive rates by increasing other corners of the credit market. She still sees some losers trying to do: the managers have directed a new diminishing, an unnamed loan from the UK office. The building represents less than 1% of its portfolio and sits in a “strong london submission”, according to confidence.
Investors appear Sanguine. In the days after the last release of the earnings, the traders launched about 5%. It’s more than 17%, training, surpassing peers.
And BXMT executives do not swear to the offices forever. They just saw their Marquis-Jam Agreement for 2018, $ 1.8 billion for a skyscraper in Manhattan called Spiral was completely returned.
“If we could make more contracts like a spiral, we would absolutely,” said Keenan, the executive director, during the invitation of earnings. But in a quarter where BXMT invested and promised more than two billion dollars of origin, she warned that the company would walk carefully. “The opening of the species of office opportunities and where we see supervision is quite narrow, and we will be extremely selective.”
This story is originally displayed on Fortune.com
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