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The Blackstone Group Inc. has sold the last of its shares in Invitation Homes, the company’s rental business. Blackstone sold around 11% of Invitation Homes’ shares for about $1.7 billion, made about $7 billion since the home rental business went public in 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Invitation Homes says that certain selling stockholders affiliated with Blackstone have started a secondary offering of 57.6 million shares of Invitation Homes common stock. Upon completing the offering and Blackstone's related distribution of its remaining 300,452 shares in Invitation Homes to its partners, Blackstone will no longer beneficially own shares in Invitation Homes, according to Seeking Alpha.
“We created a company from scratch. It was created on a yellow pad. It was an idea. Now it’s a real business,” Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s President, told the Wall Street Journal.
Blackstone created the Invitations Homes unit in 2012 in response to the housing crisis in order to capitalize on the growing demand for rental properties coming largely from people who lost homes to foreclosure in the crisis and were unable to obtain mortgage credit to buy another home. Through Invitation Homes, Blackstone became one of the biggest landlords in the U.S.
When Invitation Homes officially went public in 2017, it oversaw approximately 50,000 housing units, the largest pool of rental homes across 14 of the nation’s metropolitan markets. Blackstone stated on its website that the platform creates jobs and provides high quality, affordable housing for families nationwide.
In July 2016, Blackstone first announced the intention to go public with Invitation Homes at some point in the first half of 2017 in order to capitalize “on a rally in U.S. single-family rental landlords to list the biggest company in the industry.”
In December 2016, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported that Blackstone had “filed confidentially for an initial public offering” with regard to Invitation Homes.
