Kenneth Caplan on commercial real estate
From Ken Caplan at the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference. · · Prime Quadrant
“When we saw a separation between what's happening in office and what's happening in other areas which are much healthier, we started to have this confidence of inflation coming down.”
On , Kenneth Caplan, BX Global Co-Chief Investment Officer & Senior MD at BLACKSTONE MORTGAGE TR INC, spoke about commercial real estate during Ken Caplan at the 2024 Prime Quadrant Conference. on Prime Quadrant.
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.