The Toll Collector

While Wall Street Wasn’t looking, accountant Bruce Flatt Became a Billionaire By assembling one of the World’s largest portfolios of office Buildings, power plants and infrastructure projects—and making Brookfield asset management the Safest growth Stock

Just off a 14-hour commercial flight from Dubai, Brookfield Asset Management chief Bruce Flatt stares into a gaping hole in the ground that looks like open-heart surgery performed on an entire city block in Manhattan. Piles of beams, mazes of scaffolding and even active railroad tracks crisscross each other endlessly.

“The amount of steel here is enormous,” Flatt shouts over a cacophony of honking car horns, grinding cement mixers and moving cranes at one end of the notoriously clogged Lincoln Tunnel. More than 17.2 million pounds of steel, to be precise, enough to anchor a 67-story glass office tower. Two more towers are also going up, along with a 30-floor boutique hotel and a 16-story trapezoidal glass office building with 26-foothigh ceilings and floors the size of football fields—much of it suspended over railroad yards. Dubbed Manhattan West, this 7-million-square-foot, $5 billion project encompasses two square city blocks.

And yet it’s completely invisible in the public consciousness—the vast majority of New Yorkers have never heard of it. Most people assume it’s part of the adjacent Hudson Yards development, a $25 billion project from billionaire Stephen Ross and his Related Companies that will feature 16 skyscrapers and 18 million square feet.

That’s fitting. The high-profile Stephen Ross has an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion, owns the Miami Dolphins and travels in the same circles as Donald Trump. Bruce Flatt is an accountant from Manitoba who lives in a quiet Toronto neighborhood and often commutes by subway.

But if you’re comparing their portfolios? It’s not even close. Brookfield quietly owns entire city skylines in places like Toronto and Sydney. It’s the biggest office landlord in London and downtown Los Angeles. In Berlin it owns Potsdamer Platz and, in London, Canary Wharf, two of the biggest real estate developments in Europe. It has 14,200 hotel rooms, including Atlantis in the Bahamas and the Diplomat in Florida, and scores of shopping malls courtesy of divisions like Rouse Properties and General Growth, and several high-end Brazil shopping centers. In all, Brookfield owns some 400 million square feet of commercial space.

And that’s just the real estate. Flatt’s true passion is infrastructure, which he sees as a $35 trillion opportunity that, like Manhattan West, is hiding in plain sight. “Infrastructure will be an enormous asset class for institutional investors in the coming 25 years,” Flatt insists.

Brookfield owns 218 hydroelectric plants on 82 river systems in North and South America. In France, Brookfield has the largest independent owner of cell towers. In Chile its electric power lines serve 98% of the population. In Ireland it owns 20% of the country’s wind-farm capacity. It owns 36 ports in the U.K., North America, Australia and Europe, and in India and South America it manages 3,600 kilometers of toll roads. All told, Brookfield has 2,000 projects across 30 countries on five continents, encompassing $250 billion in assets and 70,000 employees. President Trump talks about an infrastructure plan—bruce Flatt is actually executing one.

And Wall Street loves it. Despite Brookfield’s low profile, its stock has returned 1,350% since Flatt took the helm in 2002, versus 183% for the S&P 500—that’s a Buffettesque 19% annual average, buoyed by assets that generated some $25 billion in revenues last year and net profits of $3.3 billion. With a $36 billion market cap, Brookfield is the size of KKR, Apollo, Carlyle Group and Colony Northstar combined. “Bruce is not afraid to make large bets when he sees an opportunity,” says Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s real estate chief and a possible heir to Stephen Schwarzman. “He buys high-quality, longduration assets—be they pipelines or electric grids or large pieces of real estate. Between the combination of yield and appreciation, they generate strong returns over time.” At 51, Flatt just joined the Forbes Billionaires list, with a net worth of $1.3 billion.

Flatt has been called Canada’s Warren Buffett not only because he’s a contrarian, long-term investor but also because his investment strategy relies less on price than on patience and the power of compounding income streams. “We will pay more for quality because in the fullness of time, real assets will generally always go up in value,” Flatt says. “We’d rather earn a 12% to 15% net return over 20 years than a 25% over three.”

In fact, if ever there were a collection of sleep-well-at-night investments that might one day rival the safe-haven status of U.S. Treasury bonds or gold, you could argue that it’s the well-diversified trove of real assets in Brookfield’s $250 billion portfolio. It’s essentially a call on the future of civilization itself. And it’s about to get far bigger.