Real estate: A $19 billion deal for warehouses

In “the biggest private real estate transaction ever,” Blackstone Group agreed this week to pay $18.7 billion for a network of industrial warehouses, said Liz Hoffman in The Wall Street Journal. The buyout of Singapore-based GLP and its 1,300 properties around the U.S. is “a big bet on the continued explosion of e-commerce.” GLP’s largest tenant, Amazon, and other e-commerce companies have turned warehouses into prized investments, particularly around big cities, where they “help solve the ‘last-mile’ puzzle” for storing and shipping deliveries. Blackstone already owns $140 billion in real-estate assets.