Carlyle is gearing up to make more real estate moves after a record round of fundraising.
The investment group raised $9 billion for a United States real estate fund, the company’s tenth in the category, Reuters reported. Despite the difficult fundraising environment, the haul represented a record for the firm, surpassing the $8 billion Carlyle raised for a predecessor fund in 2021.
Rob Stuckey, who spearheads the U.S. real estate arm of the company, said the firm would “avoid structurally challenged areas” with the fund. That means saying “yes” to residential, industrial and self-storage assets, but “no” to offices, hotels and traditional retail assets.
“This is a compelling moment to invest, as we see improving fundamentals across our target sectors,” Stuckey told Reuters, noting that less liquidity in the market could prove advantageous for the fund’s deployment.
In New York, Carlyle made waves in 2021 when it started snapping up small apartment buildings across Brooklyn. Over the course of a year, Carlyle bought more than 130 of them in the borough’s neighborhoods such as Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope and Cobble Hill, amassing a half-billion-dollar portfolio.
In many cases, Carlyle was buying buildings one at a time, writing the kinds of $2 million or $3 million checks common to the small investors who dominate the space, but unusual for a player as large as Carlyle, helping it fly under the radar.
In the succeeding years, Carlyle has continued its quest for domination in Brooklyn and beyond. In the last four years, the firm has purchased 232 buildings in Brooklyn and Queens for a combined $776 million, according to Crain’s. That may be an undercount, as Carlyle has been making its deals through shell companies and has been reticent to publicly speak about its small-apartment empire building.
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