Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, Inc (BREIT), a REIT managed by the worldwide real estate investment firm Blackstone, has struck a deal to purchase the Simply Self Storage portfolio for an estimated $1.2 billion.
The portfolio is being sold by Brookfield Asset Management, which first acquired a majority stake in the company for $830 million in January of 2016. According to Inside Self Storage, the Simply Self Storage portfolio includes 101 facilities spanning more than 8.5 million square feet. The company has facilities in 23 states.
BREIT currently owns a portfolio of self-storage facilities valued at $300 million. Blackstone says the addition of the Simply Self Storage portfolio will make BREIT the third large “non-listed” owner of storage in the country.
“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,” said BREIT Chairman and CEO Frank Cohen.
Blackstone included the following information in its press release:
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.
The transaction is scheduled to close at the end of 2020.
