Meet the 4 dealmakers driving Blackstone’s $325 billion commercial real estate portfolio. They walked us through career-defining deals, and how they’re thinking about opportunities in the downturn.

Blackstone

Alan Miyasaki was born to work in real estate. His father was a landlord in Baltimore, and first met his mother when she was a tenant in his building.

He’s spent the bulk of his career at Blackstone, joining the firm in 2001. First based out of New York, he was tasked with helping to launch the firm’s Asian investment business, moving abroad to Tokyo in 2007. The global financial crisis changed everything, which eventually played to Blackstone’s favor. 

Merrill Lynch, acquired by Bank of America in the midst of the crisis, had a $2 billion Asian portfolio. Bank of America decided they didn’t want to manage those assets, making Blackstone a general partner and manager over the funds. 

The portfolio provided Blackstone with the first-hand data that powers much of its investments. That sort of data is even more valuable in places like India and China, where data is more opaque than in the US. 

“What we really do, we just price risk,” Miyasaki, who is now based in Singapore, told Business Insider. The Merrill Lynch portfolio gave Blackstone an opportunity to get much better at pricing risk in Asia. India and China both don’t have title insurance, which means the firm has to do weeks of diligence to prove that the seller actually owns the assets. 

Miyasaki, and Blackstone’s Asia portfolio at large, has benefitted from the firm’s global, thematic investment style. Australia lagged behind Europe and the US in developing e-commerce retailers, but Australian consumers were still buying items online from international retailers and shipping them to the US. Blackstone invested in Australian logistics real estate, and became one of Australia’s largest logistics owner. 

While Blackstone’s thematic approach is often global, it can be quite local. Japan’s declining population would seem to make multifamily investments, which rely on demand for apartments outpacing supply to make money, a poor decision. However, these population decreases are not the same across the country. 

“What we found was yes, over time the Japanese population is declining, but if you actually dug down and looked at the map and trends in local cities, it was a little different,” Miyasaki said. 

Japan’s rural areas are drastically reducing in population, but its urban centers actually have marginal population growth.

Blackstone recently completed Japan’s largest-ever real estate deal, buying 220 rental apartments for $2.8 billion in Japan’s largest cities, like Tokyo and Osaka.  

The coronavirus has led to big changes in Miyasaki’s life, as he regularly travels across an area spanning from India to New Zealand. 

“300,000 miles a year to zero is a bit of a change for me and my family,” Miyasaki said. 

As for the ways coronavirus will change Blackstone’s investments, it is still early. However, some trends, such as the rise of e-commerce, have become only more relevant in a virtual and socially-distanced world. 

“Some of the trends that we were already seeing in the world, this is a catalyst to stimulate them more,” Miyasaki said.