Ken Caplan at the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference

🎥 Nov 25, 2025 📺 Prime Quadrant ⏱ 1m 👁 939 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

One of the nice things about real estate is you can't just print the buildings, you have to build the buildings. You have to get them entitled and financed and built. What's delivering today was actually started a couple of years ago, and what's starting today is going to be delivered a couple of years from now. One of the things that we really like about the apartment space, the rental housing space, is that the vacancy levels are still around 4 or 5%. The supply which is elevated, demand is keeping up with, and the new starts today, which again, are down 40 or 50%. If you say, okay, I don't have this excess vacancy to work off, the demand's keeping up mostly with current supply. That demand, it seems like it's going to continue, particularly since even though affordability is a concern, the affordability to rent is much better than to own, because home prices have gone up so much, because mortgage rates are higher, and it really doesn't pencil to build apartments today. And because of that, you're seeing the supply come way down. So you can say, okay, we're in a bit of an equilibrium today, but a couple years from now, you're going to see half as many apartments delivered as you're seeing today. That's obviously a very positive place to be from a supply-demand dynamic.