Blackstone Mortgage Trust has originated a $189 million loan for industrial outdoor storage acquisitions, a fast-growing segment of the wider industrial property sector.
The debt is part of the publicly traded real estate investment trust’s expanding pipeline of lending coming into 2025. It joins other major players, including Manulife Investment Management and TPG Angelo Gordon, that have been pouring money into industrial outdoor storage, also known as IOS.
Blackstone Mortgage reported last week it had a pipeline of new originations of more than $2 billion, most of it targeting multifamily, industrial and self-storage properties.
“Blackstone Mortgage Trust is actively deploying capital into compelling investment opportunities in today’s market, including the IOS sector, which benefits from similar secular tailwinds to logistics, one of Blackstone’s highest conviction themes,” Austin Pena, executive vice president of investments at Blackstone Mortgage, said in a statement.
The funding was secured for properties recently acquired by Philadelphia-based Alterra IOS, an active buyer and seller of industrial outdoor storage properties. The funding backs 49 such sites across 22 states, totaling about 235 usable acres.
The financing comes on the heels of several significant transactions for Alterra in 2024, including the sale of an institutional-grade portfolio of 51 outdoor storage assets to Peakstone Realty Trust in November for $490 million.
Since then, Alterra has acquired seven properties for almost $20 million in the Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis and Nashville, Tennessee, markets that are leased to the same tenant, Wisconsin-based Millennium, a supplier of components used to create fiber optic networks.
Alterra also bought a 15.2-acre industrial outdoor storage facility in Southern California from Wheeler Trucking for $51 million.
For the record
Justin Horowitz of Cooper Horowitz worked with Alterra to market and source the financing.