Nadeem Meghji, the ultimate Blackstone company man who had to go deal w/ a BREIT redemption crisis while on honeymoon, and who was later put in sole charge of the firm’s most important division, is out: Less than a year after being named Blackstone’s sole global head of real estate, a perch that saw him oversee a $600B+ portfolio and spearhead some industry-defining bets across asset classes, Meghji is stepping down. His exit is part of an exodus from the storied division: About a dozen Blackstone sr. managing directors – which, unlike in brokerage, actually means something there – have left the group over the past 3Y, per WSJ. Some of these Blackstone Cubs ™ have gone on to launch their own shops, others have joined the top ranks of rivals, while others still are plotting their next moves.

It’s hard at a firm like Blackstone to separate the accomplishments of the man from the machine. But safe to say that Meghji, who joined in ‘08, was one of the key instruments of Jon Gray’s reinvention of the firm as a real estate-first operation. He was front & center on some of BX’s defining deals over the last decade and change, from the formation of multifamily holdco LivCor, to the $10B AIR Communities acquisition, to the data-center megabet. Since his co-captain Kathleen McCarthy announced her exit in Nov., the spotlight on Meghji grew. But one of the deals most visibly associated w/ him, the $4.5B rescue capital injection into BREIT from the University of California, is, at least so far, struggling. 👇

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As great friend of the pod Leanna Orr reported in the Allocator last month, UC’s “swashbuckling” bailout of BREIT - which Meghji famously had to work on while honeymooning on New Zealand’s South Island – has fallen well short of expectations more than halfway through its 6Y term, and its contracted 11.25% net return is in jeopardy. BREIT’s Class I shares returned just 4.4% net for the 3Y period ending July ‘26, per Blackstone figures. Here’s Leanna:

The deal’s sweetener is a $1.1B BREIT stake the Blackstone corporation took out at the same time to backstop UC’s contracted 11.25% annual return. If that position can’t make up the gap between BREIT’s actual net returns after six years and the 11.25%, UC won’t get the return many in the media described as “guaranteed.”

To meet that return now, BREIT would have to absolutely crush and deliver 17.3% annualized through Dec. ‘28, per an analysis by Chilton Capital Management. Let’s see how that goes.

What of the other prominent Blackstone Cubs who’ve left in the last couple years? McCarthy hasn’t revealed her next move yet – her bio still says “Former Global Co-Head of Real Estate at Blackstone.” J-Poll has been at Starwood as president since April ‘25, though one always wonders whether an outsider being brought in that high up can work out. Fmr. head of US acquisitions Tyler Henritze, meanwhile, is going gung-ho at his Town Lane, making splashy platform deals in both IOS and sr. housing, and buying a grocery-anchored portfolio. He shook the fundraising world up when he raised $1.25B in 9 mos, sans placement agents.

And where does Meghji go from here? A company memo cited by Bloomberg states that he “plans to take some time with his young family before seeking new pursuits." It’s possible that BX is just trimming down its ranks of incredibly well-compensated lieutenants as it gets into fighting shape for whatever’s next. And we’re back to the co-captain state of play we had before Meghji was put in sole charge – the firm tapped 2 CRE vets, Americas head David Levine & real estate president Giovanni Cutaia, to assume his responsibilities. Meghji will leave w/ a monster Rolodex and the ability to get into a room w/ any pension, SWF or insurer he fancies. Does he parlay that access into building up his own thing? Does he go take another Big job elsewhere? Or does he, after nearly 20Y of captain-of-the-universe grinding, actually go chill for a bit?

Stan Kroenke’s pending takeover of the Angels ⚾ is giving CRE heads in the OC hope that a long-stalled redevelopment plan for a 150-acre parcel around the stadium will be resurrected. The $4B deal for the team primes Kroenke (owner of Arsenal, the Nuggets, the Rams, among others) to develop on the city-owned land, which for 30Y has been in various states of limbo. At one point, the city approached Disney 🐭 to take on the project, but it passed. Then came Ratners’ Forest City, but it pulled out. Most recently, current Angels owner Arte Moreno pitched a mixed-use megadevelopment w/ 5K+ units, 2.7M sf of office, nearly 600K sf of retail and 943 hotel rooms, per this OCBJ dispatch.

The state, however, found that Anaheim negotiated exclusively w/ Moreno w/o attempting to find an affordable-housing solution. Anaheim settled w/ the state for $123M and the sale was cleared to close, but an FBI probe killed it anyway: The then-mayor Harry Sidhu resigned in May ’22, and the council killed the deal. (Sidhu later did prison time over charges stemming from the sale.) Anaheim’s current mayor Ashleigh Aitken told the OCBJ that the city “would be very interested in sitting down with the organization and seeing if their priorities align with our own.”

Kroenke certainly has the chops for the task. He built LA’s superb SoFi Stadium and turned a 300-acre chunk of Inglewood into what’s now known as Hollywood Park. And he’s coming in at a tasty time for the OC: Ducks owner Henry Samueli, who made his billions in the semiconductor industry, has committed to a $4B, 100-acre mixed-use project known as OCVibe, while also committing to a $1B glow-up of the Honda Center. Meanwhile, Disney is moving ahead on its DisneylandForward expansion.

More OC juice: Inside the Ziggurat’s Zigs and Zags

Gary Barnett has closed on his long-telegraphed $1.3B construction financing for Times Square supertall “The Torch, a mixed-use tower w/ a mammoth 1,800 keys. A new TASE filing spotted by TRD reveals that the sr. is coming from a JPM-led consortium, but the tastiest nugget is the price of the debt: His sr. is priced at SOFR + 4, so currently 7.62%, but the $150M mezz slug is cheaper than that, at 6.79%. You don’t see that too often, but obv w/ Gary a lot of unusual things happen. Recall that in the fall, Extell disclosed that an unnamed hedge fund (we suspect it’s JVP + Qatari money here) had agreed to provide it $1.2B in pref 🤯 x 9 projects.

Revisit the pod: The Father of Billionaires' Row

“Look, it takes money to make money, String. Otherwise every pauper would be a king.” - Clay Davis

Two days after Greystone closed the sale of its special servicing biz to Andrew Farkas' C-IV, the exec who helped build the unit sued for his cut: Rob Russell, who ran the Greystone unit until he resigned in Feb., says he’s entitled to 3 distinct chunks of comp: an ongoing piece of servicing-fee revenue on the DUS loans his team originated; 10% of the net profit on 33 bonds; and 5% of the proceeds from any sale of the platform, after Greystone recovers its capital investment – that right survived his departure, he claims, b/c he wasn’t fired for cause. Insiders: Read on 👇