Real estate was often the topic at the dinner table when Wesley LePatner was growing up in Midtown East.
“My mom is a real estate attorney and my father was a bankruptcy attorney, and a lot of what they talked about in our home life was what was happening in the ’80s and ’90s in the real estate space, particularly in New York City,” she said. “You could see the way in which the evolving landscape where I lived was impacting our lives.”
In January, LePatner will take the reins from the retiring Frank Cohen as chief executive of the $55 billion Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust — among the world’s largest REITs by net asset value.
LePatner, 43, spoke last week about her career and being a woman in the business at a symposium of women in real estate hosted by New York University’s Schack Institute. She also revealed some of the inner workings of the investment giant.
After graduating from Yale with a history degree, LePatner started in the real estate division of Goldman Sachs. After a decade at the investment bank she joined Blackstone in 2014 as a managing director and rose through the ranks to chief operating officer and board member of BREIT, which has $110 billion in assets.
As a young woman with a liberal arts degree, LePatner said she often felt self-conscious early in her career.
“I realized about 18 months into it that I was actually approaching it in the completely wrong way,” she said. “I was self-conscious and insecure about those two things versus leaning into the fact that those things didn’t necessarily make me different in a bad way. They actually made me different in a good way.”
LePatner said she worked her way up in the business by seeking out mentors, soliciting feedback from colleagues and learning to ask for what she wanted. In 2007, then-Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn gave her and a group of female analysts advice that has stuck with her.
“The goal is for all of you to embrace change and get comfortable being uncomfortable because the market is about to change a lot,” Cohn told them. “And if you’re not going to be able to change with it, it’s going to be really hard for you.”
A lot has changed. When LePatner started at Blackstone a decade ago, the firm was investing in a mix of retail, office, multifamily and warehouses.
“You fast forward to today and that whole pie chart has changed because the world changed,” she said.
The firm is now bullish on data centers, warehouses and rental housing — especially student housing, she said. BREIT’s portfolio is more than 85 percent concentrated in data centers, rental housing and the industrial market.
“This is where we see the world moving and so we want to be investing behind those trends,” she said.
Since BREIT’s creation seven years ago, its annualized net return is 10 percent.
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LePatner described the evolution of a deal at Blackstone. An idea is first brought to the acquisitions teams in different regions, then works its way through a review process before landing in front of the investment committee, which includes the firm’s real estate partners and top brass like Jon Gray, Michael Chae and Stephen Scwartzman.
“We have a very consensus-driven firm,” she said. “So there’s a lot of different touch points that we have as we’re looking at investment opportunities and we try to bring our team together as one.”