Ken Caplan at the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference.

🎥 Nov 26, 2025 📺 Prime Quadrant ⏱ 1m 👁 359 views

Ken Caplan at the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference. Visit our YouTube channel for the full video. Link in Bio.

About Kenneth Caplan

Kenneth Caplan, Co-Chief Investment Officer and Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, has spoken at several events in 2024 and 2025 about the firm’s investment strategy and outlook. At the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference, he stated that Blackstone saw real estate values bottoming at the beginning of 2024 and increased its real estate investing to two and a half times the prior year’s level. He attributed this confidence to a belief that inflation was coming down and that interest rate cuts were coming, and noted that Blackstone’s private equity and credit deployment had reached a record. Caplan described the firm as “highly thematic” rather than an index fund, and said it focuses on sectors such as IT, software services, business services, healthcare, and insurance. Caplan has discussed the firm’s shift away from U.S. office buildings, which he said fell from over 60% of the global real estate portfolio before the Global Financial Crisis to less than 2%. He highlighted logistics as a major growth area, noting that it grew from less than 1% of the portfolio in 2010 to over 40% by 2024, driven by e-commerce tenants. In rental housing, he pointed to vacancy rates around 4-5% and a decline in new apartment starts of 40-50%, which he said creates a favorable supply-demand dynamic. Caplan has also emphasized the importance of data in informing Blackstone’s macro views, stating that the firm’s scale provides a feedback loop from its thousands of properties and portfolio companies.

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Transcript (1 segments)

Kenneth Caplan0:00

There is so much negative sentiment for the last couple of years on real estate, mainly because you had interest rates going up. When we saw a separation between what's happening in office, what's happening in other areas which are much healthier, and we started to have this confidence of inflation coming down and, you know, not necessarily betting on timing, but a direction of travel of rate cuts, cuts coming, you know, at the beginning of this year we said, you know, we see real estate values bottoming, and we say, think it's time to invest. And we didn't just say it, we did it. I mean, our, our year-to-date real estate investing this year is two and a half times what it was last year. And it's not just real estate. Our private equity and credit deployment, uh, has been, I think, uh, a record, uh, this year, uh, at Blackstone. That's what we saw. It gave us confidence to invest. You know, again, we don't just sprinkle it around. We're not an index fund. We're, we're highly thematic. And in the areas where we had that confidence and conviction, combined with what we're seeing on the macro level, you know, it gave us the confidence to invest.