27 Oct 2020
NEW YORK, October 26, 2020 – Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, Inc. (“BREIT”) today announced that BREIT has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Simply Self Storage from a Brookfield Asset Management real estate fund for approximately $1.2 billion. Simply Self Storage is one of the top five private owners of self storage and operates a high-quality portfolio totaling eight million square feet across the U.S. BREIT currently owns a $300 million portfolio of self storage facilities, and following this acquisition, BREIT will be the third largest non-listed owner of storage in the U.S.
Frank Cohen, Chairman and CEO of BREIT, said, “This transaction is a complementary addition to BREIT’s high-quality portfolio of income-generating real estate, which is heavily weighted towards logistics and multifamily primarily in growth markets. Simply Self Storage is a best-in-class company with significant potential for growth through future acquisitions in a highly fragmented sector, and similar to logistics, self-storage is a resilient sector through economic cycles because of low tenant turnover, minimal maintenance costs and stable cash flows. We look forward to continuing to acquire high quality assets on behalf of our BREIT investors.”
Brookfield acquired Simply Self Storage in 2016 in one of its opportunistic real estate funds. Since that time, Brookfield more than doubled the size of the company and helped transform the business into a fully-integrated institutional platform. Simply Self Storage has a robust talent base and leading technology and processes across its facilities, including revenue management and digital marketing.
More than 90% of BREIT’s real estate investments are in multifamily, industrial, and net leased assets. BREIT has approximately $3.6 billion of immediate liquidity to execute on acquisitions of high-quality assets.
This transaction is expected to close prior to the end of 2020, subject to certain customary closing conditions.
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is serving as legal advisor to BREIT, and BofA Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. are serving as financial advisors to BREIT. RBC Capital Markets LLC, Newmark Group Inc., and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP advised Brookfield.
Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, Inc. (BREIT) is a perpetual-life, institutional quality real estate investment platform that brings private real estate to income focused investors. BREIT invests in stabilized, income-generating U.S. commercial real estate across key property types and to a lesser extent in real estate-related securities. BREIT is externally managed by a subsidiary of Blackstone (NYSE: BX), a global leader in real estate investing. Blackstone’s real estate business was founded in 1991 and has approximately $167 billion in investor capital under management. Further information is available at www.breit.com.
