Commercial/Multifamily Briefs from Blackstone, QTS, JLL

Blackstone Funds to Acquire QTS Realty Trust in $10 Billion Transaction

Data center real estate investment trust QTS Realty Trust, Overland Park, Kansas, and Blackstone, New York, announced that Blackstone affiliates will acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of QTS Realty Trust for $78 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at nearly  $10 billion, including the assumption of debt.

The purchase price represented a 21 percent premium to QTS’ closing share price on June 4, 2021 and a 24 percent premium to the volume weighted-average share price over the last 90 days. Both firms said they expect the transaction to close in second-half 2021.

Upon completion of the transaction, QTS’ common stock will no longer be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. QTS will be jointly owned by Blackstone Infrastructure Partners and Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust.

Jefferies LLC and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC serve financial advisors to QTS and Hogan Lovells US LLP and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP serve as legal counsel to QTS. Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC act as financial advisors to Blackstone and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serves as its legal counsel.

JLL Introduces Real Estate Data Platform JLL Azara

JLL, Chicago, released JLL Azara, a data platform that enables organizations to make data-driven portfolio, facilities, space and workplace management decisions.

“Capturing and leveraging data has so much untapped potential in the commercial real estate technology space, with benefits that can extend across entire organizations, impacting not only business decisions but overall employee experience and sustainability practices as well,” said Sharad Rastogi, President, Revenue, JLL Technologies.

Real estate cost is the second-largest liability on most firms’ balance sheets, yet a recent Forrester survey found 62 percent of corporate real estate decisionmakers lack the proper technology needed to analyze data. And JLL’s Future of Work survey indicated access to effective data and analytics ranks among the top three constraints that limit real estate leaders’ ability to add value to their organization. JLL Azara uses machine learning to unite siloed, disparate datasets into one platform, providing a single source of information to enable insight from data in real time.